Prolegomena of a research project. The popular novel in Romanian cultural space

This paper relies on the enlargement of the Romanian literary canon and on a greater emphasis on the social relevance of literature by investigating the most relevant theoretical contributions operating with notions such as “long nineteenth century”, “popular culture”, “genre literature” and “subgenre”. All attempts to analyse the Romanian non-canonical novel is based on the adoption of a terminology focused on consumption parameters: ”popular fiction”, ”mass literature”, ”popular novel”, ”bestseller”. Traditional theoretical issues such as literary canon, periodization, authorship attribution, and literary movements can be redefined through a new perspective bolstered by Popular literature, 19th-century contexts and Digital Literary Studies (DLS). The most efficient way of overcoming the theoretical difficulties encountered so far in the research of modern Romanian prints would be an initiative that combines Digital Humanities tools and methods with the traditional approaches on literary history and theory. Pop Lite is the first Romanian research project to propose such an approach.