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The peasant and the nation plot: a distant reading of the Romanian rural novel from the first half of the twentieth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2022

Cosmin Borza Open the ORCID record for Cosmin Borza [Opens in a new window] ,
Daiana Gârdan  and
Emanuel Modoc
Cosmin Borza*
Affiliation:
Sextil Pușcariu Institute of Linguistics and Literary History, Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca Branch, Romania
Daiana Gârdan
Affiliation:
Faculty of Letters and Arts, Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu, Romania
Emanuel Modoc
Affiliation:
Sextil Pușcariu Institute of Linguistics and Literary History, Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca Branch, Romania
*
*Corresponding author. Email: cosmi_borza@yahoo.com
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Abstract

Our article conducts a critical reassessment of one of the most influential cultural myths in Eastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the nationalist definition of peasantry as embodying the quintessence of the nation. In order to evaluate the imagological scope and ideological implications engendered by this so-called ‘people-nation myth’, we focus on the Romanian culture, whom we consider fully representative for the Eastern European context. More exactly, our study employs a distant reading of the Romanian rural novel from the first half of the twentieth century, precisely the literary subgenre supposed to reflect the coalescence between the peasantry and the nation. By analysing the co-occurrences in these novels between words belonging to the vocabularies of nation and rurality, we aim at showing that – contrary to traditional historiographic consensus – nation building has less to do with language or ethnicity, and much more to do with social emancipation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , April 2023 , pp. 75 - 91
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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