The Great Female Unread. Romanian Women Novelists in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: a Quantitative Approach

Abstract

The following paper intends to investigate the main junctures and disjunctures of Romanian prose written by women in the first half of the twentieth century from a quantitative perspective. The paper will employ a macroanalysis of both the novels written in this period and the prose written by female writers, in order to establish a pattern in the modernisation and institutionalisation of Romanian literature in the inter-war period, more specifically in the 1930s, the decade that saw the emergence of the main canonical Romanian novels. The paper will also delve into the main principles and discussions surrounding early Romanian feminism. Aspects such as import literature, translations, and the circulation of Western literary trends in the Romanian cultural field will be critical to understand how Romanian prose written by women evolved over the course of the twentieth century and established an alternative literary canon.