The Traditions of Invention

Alex Drace-Francis’s book contains a collection of eleven essays which study representations of Romanian culture from the eighteenth century to contemporary times, each of them taking a somewhat different angle. As such, the book does not claim to have the coherence of a classical monograph. At the same time, while the articles differ in scope and length, they are organised around overarching themes which provide the basis for a study which is more systematic than many of the comparable essay collections written by the same author over a long period of time. The chapters follow a chronological order and are clustered around five parts. These are as follows: social representations, travel and alterity, myths and discourses of the nation, at the verbal frontiers of identity, and last but not least East–Westernism in the Cold War age. In the introduction, the author situates his work within existing research into geocultural identity. He also explains how his account complements Anglo-Saxon scholarship which has been dominated by postcolonial studies and within that framework has been particularly influenced by Edward Said’s concept of orientalism. While acknowledging the relevance of the postcolonial method, Drace-Francis also calls attention to its potential pitfalls, particularly that by playing down the degree of intellectual agency in South-east Europe it may render the region subject to passive representations. Moreover, the author also warns against the simplifying tendencies which may emerge if representations are perceived in a monolithic way. It is precisely the multifarious nature of representations which constitutes the focus of literary image study—his chosen primary methodology

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Alterity · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Identity (music · Ideology · Linguistics · Mythology · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Romanian · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy