Adriana Stan’s research while affiliated with Babeș-Bolyai University and other places

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE MEMORY NOVELS PUBLISHED IN THE ROMANIAN SPACE (1990–2022) This article offers the first bibliography of the memory novels published in the Romanian literary space between 1990–2022. The novel of memory is a literary genre with a global spread, and at the same time a prominent national (sub)genre, spanning from postcolonial societies to post-dictatorial and post-communist cultures. Using lexicographical sources, as well as catalogues and search engines developed by the most important libraries and publishing houses, we identified 230 memory novels released in Romania (and, incidentally, in the Republic of Moldova) during the last three decades. For each item we provide the full bibliographical reference. Additionally, we propose five labels covering the subgenres of the novel of memory: testimonial novel, post-testimonial novel, coming of age novel, transgenerational novel and historiographic metafiction. We use one of these five labels to annotate each item in our list, in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the formal, thematic, and mnemonic diversity of the memory novels. Keywords: novel of memory, bibliography, post-communism, genre, subgenres.

This article argues for a rethinking of how we label the diversity of subgenres that have emerged in the postcolonial and post-Cold War world within the global genre of the novel, with the so-called memory turn and its aftermath. We identify the memory novel as one of the most important genres in contemporary global literature, and we zoom in on its forms and dynamics in post-communist Romania. Drawing on a corpus of over 200 novels published in Romania between 1990 and 2022, we propose a new set of subgenre labels that have the potential to more accurately capture the formal, thematic, and political characteristics of contemporary novels from Romania and beyond. These labels are: testimonial novel, post-testimonial novel, coming-of-age novel, transgenerational novel, and historiographical metafiction.

This study seeks to theorize the post-communist anti-communist novel as a distinct and productive genre in East-Central European literatures, which we describe – in polemic with the better-known ostalgie – as a narrative of ostodium. We argue that anti-communist fiction became a cohesive genre in post-communism owing to its rigid view of the past, which was kept alive and significant, while simultaneously being antagonized, even after communism had collapsed. To that end, we explain how the anti-communist mindset assumed by intellectuals from the region during communism (which had then been branded as ‘anti-politicsʼ) maintained monopoly over post-communist cultural production, and merged with ascending post-communist neoliberalism that promoted an anti-statist public mythology. We further outline the shifting shapes in which the ideological bias of the post-communist anti-communist novel was conveyed, and draw distinctions from proximate genres, such as the political novel, le roman á la thèse and historiographic metafiction. One crucial argument in this respect regards the postmodern entanglements of the post-communist anti-communist novel: in maintaining an univocal rejection of the communist metanarrative, they took on a stronger political thèse than in Western postmodernism, but also enhanced postmodernism’s anti-realist drive by failing to provide an understanding of the post-communist present.