The book offers a view of national self-identification in the literary culture of twentieth century Romania with a special focus on the postcolonial paradigm. Romanian identity narratives downplay the colonial setup of the country's past and the colonial past goes unmentioned in the country's historiography and popular culture. However, the postcolonial paradigm helps readers grasp national self-identification in modern Romanian culture. The author analyses how Anglo-American reporting on interwar Romania and later Romanian historical fiction establish notions such as hybridity and cultural overlap as conducive to the making of modern Romanian culture.
Contents: Romanian Quest for Identity - Nationalism and Literary Image Studies - Postcolonialism and Modern Romanian Literary Culture - Adversarial Worldview - Language of Indictment - The Ethnonym in Romanian Self-identification - English-written Self-identification - Westernization as a Culture-Bound Narrative.