Why don't we have a novel of our own?": The Anatomy of a Romanian Literary Complex

Abstract: This article addresses and disproves one of the most long-standing clichés of Romanian literary criticism, namely the underdevelopment of the early novel, especially in relation to poetry. It discusses the inferiority complex and the illusion of exceptionalism that went hand in hand with this impressionistic claim about the distribution of literary genres, by looking at several critical interventions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Then, it provides a quantitative overview of the actual situation of the early Romanian novel compared to the poetry volumes published in the same period, concluding that the myth of novelistic underdevelopment was a politically useful fiction in an age of nation-building.