Authors

Discussion

My paper addresses the cooperation of regionalism and nationalism as anticolonial impulses mostly articulated through poetry. The association with ‘Provençal regionalism’ (Roche, Heltzel 2013) and its legitimisation outside France draw an arc between the Kingdom of Romania and Transylvania (a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in the late 19^th century. Firstly, the heritage of modern Romanian poetry is deeply intertwined with Western poetic production, seen as a reservoir of literary themes and formal innovation. On the one hand, the self-colonising viewpoint (Kiossev 1999) claims that Romanian poetry derives from Western influences. On the other hand, conservative voices express an anticolonial reflex against the Westernisation of Romanian literary production and celebrate a traditionalist poetry by proposing a nationalist rhetoric. Moving beyond this binary interpretation which posits the existence of a divide between the West and the East, a less-discussed relationship of mutual support was established between Western regionalism and Eastern nationalism, both moving against the hegemony of the ‘Parisian centre’ (Lafont 2004; Costa 2023). In this sense, the relationship between the Occitan poet Frédéric Mistral and the Romanian poet Vasile Alecsandri perfectly illustrates the transnationalism of cultural traditionalism in the face of ethnic oppression within an inter-imperial context (Parvulescu & Boatcă 2022). Secondly, during the same period Hugo Meltzl and Samuel Brassai’s Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, characterised by polyglotism and the protection of small literatures and languages hosted Frédéric Mistral’s contributions and legitimised Félibrige’s Provençal association (Monterde 2014, Szabó 2019), in which Mistral was involved, in order to promote regionalism as a means of reinforcing a multi-ethnic and multilingual area like Transylvania, where Acta Comparationis emerged. In short, the collaboration between Mistral and the editors Meltzl and Brassai revitalised Provençal culture and language, creating a mutually beneficial partnership. If Franco-Romanian cooperation is rooted in linguistic and hegemonic criteria such as pan-Latinism, by linking Western regionalism to Eastern nationalism, the editors of Acta Comparationis strategically capitalise on the collaboration with Mistral and Félibrige by strengthening regionalism based on different locations against imperialism. Nevertheless, the two collaborations reflect the rise of conservative views as a coping mechanism against cultural peripherality. They also reveal the feedback loop and the structural similarities between Occitan regionalism, Romanian nationalism, and Transylvanian regionalism: an ethnic component (Hroch 2009), an anti-imperial drive in response to recent historical struggles, and, last but not least, the similar functioning of marginal literary identities in different locations (Lippit 2005).