Întoarcere la bătălia pentru roman. Teorii despre roman în spațiul cultural românesc interbelic

Abstract

Even though we might live with the impression that the debates about the (Romanian) novel belong exclusively to the interwar period, in reality they started earlier, somewhere around the second half of the 19th c. Novel theoreticians such as: Radu Ionescu, that, in the preface of the novel Donjuanii din București, inaugurates this type of debates, Titu Maiorescu, the promoter of the „people novel”, or Nicolae Iorga, the critic that started the so-called „battle for the novel”, show us that there was an interest towards this genre in the Romanian cultural space also, a genre that at that moment claimed a hegemonic position. Yet, the First World War will put an abrupt end to these debates related to the Romanian novel, debates that would be reiterated in the interwar period, in another cultural context, of course at another level. Thus, the second part of the article is an attempt to recuperate the atmosphere towards the literary phenomenon after the First world War by focusing on the critical attitudes of the most important cultural voices of the new era, attitudes that vary from hope – generated by the belief that the first major global conflagration regenerated the creative forces of Romanian writers – to doubt – through which, by resorting to a lamentativ tone, critics denounce the absence of real (i.e. artistic) novels from national cultural space.