The importance of the problem addressed by the project Ideological Functions of Popular Fiction in Postcommunist Romania (IDEOLIT) lies in several complex and interrelated aspects. The first factor is the worldwide scope of academic studies devoted to popular fiction (PF), a concept that includes science fiction and fantasy literature, detective literature, spy literature, romance literature, children’s literature and comics (even if such a taxonomy is always subject to nuances). This interest corresponds to a more general development in the epistemic horizon of the time, in postmodernity, which questions the old hierarchical relationship between “high” and “low” culture, between “central” and “marginal”. An important reason is also the impact of the economic circulation of the PF, capable of configuring cultural markets at national and global levels. In the neoliberal system of the last decades, economic rationality has often become synonymous with artistic rationality. Another factor is transnational: PF circulates in mass culture not only on a national level (for example, within the Anglo-American market), but is one of the most exported cultural goods. For the most part, this export is unidirectional, from a “center” (the Anglo-American market) to various peripheries and semi-peripheries, but there are exceptions – witness the great success of the Nordic crime novel of the last decade, which has been imported intensively into the USA and Europe.
The interest in the PF thus creates a network of questions that can be divided into the following themes:
- a cultural subject, open to issues such as the competition between different subgenres in the literary field, the changing of the canon through the inclusion of popular works;
- an economic subject (the circulation of the PF produces an important movement of capital on the global cultural market);
- an institutional subject (allowing reflection on institutions such as the police, reflected in detective fiction, or erotic practices in romance);
- a political subject (discussing romance literature in relation to feminism or young adult or fantasy literature in relation to the racial diversity of characters);
- an epistemic subject (science fiction has often been at the forefront of the technological imaginary of a period – cf. William Gibson and his anticipatory concept of cyberspace, introduced in the 1980s);
- a sociographic theme that questions the classes represented in the PF (the aspirational class of the future in SF, the marginalized classes in detective or spy novels);
- a transnational theme that opens up reflections on the unequal exchanges between cultural centers and (semi-)peripheries.
Project name: Ideological Functions of Popular Fiction in Postcommunist Romania (IDEOLIT)
Technical description: Code: PN-IV-P2-2.1-TE-2023-1275, Project funded by UEFISCDI and hosted by the University “Lucian Blaga” of Sibiu (ULBS); Contract value for ULBS: 500.000 RON/ 100.000 EUR; Number of team members: 5; Duration: 3.01.2025-31.12.2026.
Acknowledgement: This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-IV-P2-2.1-TE-2023-1275, within PNCDI IV