Subgenurile „de consum” şi „literatura majoră”: „Animale bolnave”, de Nicolae Breban
“Popular” subgenres and “major literature”: „Animale bolnave”/“Sick animals” by Nicolae Breban
This article explains the way in which Romanian novels of the sixties have combined popular fiction structures with techniques of the canonical writers of Russian XIX-th century and early XX-th century such as Dostoyevsky or Faulkner. The main goal was to achieve some kind of genre that could break with the dogmatic socialist realism and gain means to work with new sorts of political and social issues through novel. Nicolae Breban, one of the most important figures in postwar Romanian novel, has conquered this new type of novel in the sixties once he has published “Animale bolnave” (“Sick animals”), a detective novel altered with many modernistic narrative techniques. The case of this novel becomes the case of a literature who had to empower popular fiction genres with high culture techniques in order to create the image of a strong, competitive literature.
Keywords: detective fiction, religious groups, popular fiction, canonical writers, Romanian novel in the sixties
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