How do literacy and the development of literary culture promote the development of a national identity? This well-researched and readable book explores the rise of Romanian-language literary, educational and printing institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bringing out a story that has not been fully explored in English. In twenty concise yet scholarly chapters, Alex Drace-Francis builds on and engages with current knowledge about print culture, modernization, national identity and state formation, to make an original contribution to ongoing debates in these areas.

Based on hundreds of primary sources in a wide range of languages, this book offers a reevaluation of Romanian images of self and other, as well as of foreign images of the country and people. A nuanced and historically-grounded contribution to the lively debates over Balkanism, Orientalism and identities in Romania and in Europe as a whole.

"From the Castle to the Agora: Romanian Cultural Institutes Abroad in the Making of National Culture" presents the Romanian cultural institutes abroad in the process of making and exporting national culture. It is a particularly interesting process, as it is not obvious what Romanian culture is, considering dualities like official and unofficial culture, tradition and innovation, culture and politics, modern and post-modern features. There are also tensions concerning practical strategies of functioning, namely between the center and the local branch and between the "fortress" and the "open space," as represented by the concentrated model of the state and the networking, de-concentrated supranational model of EU.

As a direct result of an international conference organized in the year 2021, the volume tries to shed light on the way in which the translation activity contributed to the Romanian culture and language, drawing from different traditions and cultures it came in contact with (directly or indirectly), and thus mingling the own Slavonic church tradition with the new and revolutionary ideas of the Western world and using this mix to modernise the society, language and the politics in this region. Furthermore, this eclectic collection of articles highlights the fact that it was neither the exclusive merit of the Transylvanian scholars, nor of the Moldavian or Wallachian ones to have contributed decisively to the formation of the national consciousness and to the standardisation of the language, but it was rather the collaboration, the circulation of people and ideas that furthered the modernity in all three Romanian Principalities. Without disregarding the regional specificity of the Romanian Enlightenment, the volume focuses on the interconnections of the agents involved in the cultural transfer, on the networks they created for the dissemination of knowledge and political thought and on the common effort to render the new ideas and concepts of the foreign cultures in a national language that could be accessible to the Romanians.

This compelling book assesses the development of the mass media since the Romanian Revolution in December 1989 and the media's impact on cultural development, the public sphere, civil society and democracy. It controversially claims that Romania's failure to experience a thoroughgoing enlightenment project in its entire history remains a major obstacle for producing democratic ownership of the media and democratic development of society. Analyzing both the print and broadcast media and their respective effects on development, the book also discusses the effects of Romanian law on media and societal development, ethics, and media responsibilities. It concludes, however, that far from having an absolutely negative impact on Romanian post-communism, the media has helped produce a contradictory empirical form that equally contains positive moments in terms of subjective cultural development.

Romanian identity narratives downplay the colonial setup of the country's past. Yet the postcolonial paradigm helps readers grasp national self-identification in modern Romanian culture. Anglo-American reporting on interwar Romania and Romanian historical fiction expound on the postcolonial and adversarial rhetoric of Romanian colonial history.