The Last Bastion of European Romanticism: A Quantitative Analysis of Poetry in the Romanian Literary Magazine <em>Convorbiri literare</em> (1867–1916)

Abstract

The article presents a quantitative analysis of poetry published in the most popular literary periodical of modern Romania, Convorbiri literare (CL), from its founding in 1867 to 1916, when Romania entered World War I. Often seen as the last major magazine of European Romanticism, CL appeared at a time when poetry was a privileged genre in Romanian literature, and it hosted in its pages both the national poet Mihai Eminescu and nineteenth-century’s most prominent Romanian literary critic Titu Maiorescu. Arguing that the publication and theorization of poetry was an integral part of one of the last nation-building processes in Europe, the article indexes and quantitatively analyzes all forms of poetry and of what can be viewed as poetic networks in CL. By using ARCANUM’s digital archive of more than 66,000 pages of CL, three strata of poetry-related metadata are extracted and examined: the local production of poetry (who published in CL and when, and how much did they publish); poetry imports (whose poetry was translated into Romanian in CL and when, and what were the authors’ origins); and networks of influence (which foreigners were most often mentioned in relation to the two most talked-about Romanian Romantic poets of the century, Eminescu and Vasile Alecsandri). Thus, the article aims to chart the national regime of relevance that applies to Romanian modern poetry by uncovering the international network of authors who were at the center of literary debates in CL.