Andrei Terian, On the Romanian Biographical Novel: Fictional Representations of Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu
On the Romanian Biographical Novel:
Fictiona Representations of Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu
By choosing as starting point the biographical novels dedicated to Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu, this study examines the reluctance shown to this narrative form by contemporary Romanian literature and it also explores some of the structural features of the biographical novel as genre. Thus, despite the obvious reconnection of Romanian literature to the world literary space over the last decades, the suspicion of this cultural system towards fictional processing of biographical data is explained by the post-communist condition of Romanian literature, namely by its imperative to rediscover the historical truths that have been obscured by the communist ideology. Regarding the genre conventions of the biographical novel, this study emphasizes, in contrast to much of contemporary research of this form, its predominantly literary nature, manifested by its polemic placement against modernism aesthetics, by its propensity for certain narrative motives and scenarios, and by the configuration of various specific intertextual webs.
Keywords: world literary space, (semi)peripheral literatures, Romanian fiction, biographical novel, modernism, Mircea Eliade, Ioan Petru Culianu
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