Acasă Articole RTR The Character Network in Detective Fiction: A Dialogic Analysis of Mihail Sadoveanu’s...
The Character Network in Detective Fiction: A Dialogic Analysis of Mihail Sadoveanu’s The Hatchet
Rezumat
Abstract: Mihail Sadoveanu’s The Hatchet ( Baltagul, 1930) has been repeatedly assigned a wide and often contradictory range of generic labels, from realist and pastoral novel to philosophical, initiatory, tragic, and detective narrative. Rather than clarifying the text, this accumulation reflects a critical strategy of generic inflation aimed at securing canonical legitimacy while avoiding the low-prestige category of detective fiction. This article aims to provide a blueprint for a possible character network structure of detective fiction by revisiting the minority position advanced by G. Călinescu, who classified The Hatchet as a detective novella, and tests this hypothesis through a digital analysis of character dialogue. Using a manually annotated dataset and dialogue-based character network visualizations, this study shows that the narrative is highly centralized around Vitoria Lipan, whose investigative interrogations drive the plot, while secondary characters function as episodic holders of clues. The linear succession of encounters, absence of autonomous social networks, and procedural accumulation of knowledge align the text structurally with detective fiction and formally with the novella. This article argues that acknowledging The Hatchet as a detective novella offers a more precise generic reading and exposes the canonizing biases of Romanian literary criticism.
Keywords: genre theory; detective fiction; Romanian literature; character network; dialogue analysis.
Citation suggestion: Pojoga, Vlad. “The Character Network in Detective Fiction: A Dialogic Analysis of Mihail Sadoveanu’s The Hatchet”. Transilvania, no. 12 (2025): 5-13.
https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2025.12.02.
Acknowledgement: This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Digitization, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-IV-P1-PCE-2023-2025, within PNCDI IV.
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