The Sickle and the Piano. A Distant Reading of Work in the Nineteenth Century Romanian Novel

Abstract

This article conducts a semantic search of The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel: The 19th Century (MDRR), through which the authors attempt to identify the occurrences of several key concepts for class and labour imagery in the nineteenth-century Romanian novel, such as “muncă” (labour/work), “muncitor” (labourer/worker), “țăran” (peasant), “funcționar” (civil servant), alongside two main words that strikingly point out to a dissemblance of representation of work: “seceră” (sickle) and “pian” (piano). The authors show that physical work is underrepresented in the Romanian novel between 1844 and 1900, and that novelists prefer to participate to the rise of the novel through representing the bourgeois intimate space.

Keywords

• work
• labour
• romanian novel
• nineteenth century fiction
• realism