Corina Croitoru, Fronturi interioare. Poezia românească a celor două războaie mondiale, Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2024, 273 p.

Abstract

Corina Croitoru’s Fronturi interioare is a most welcome addition to Romanian literary history and criticism, as evidenced by its receipt of the 2024-2025 Bac-Fest Award for Poetry Criticism. Just like the author’s first book, Politica ironiei în poezia românească sub comunism (The Politics of Irony in Romanian Poetry under Communism), this volume examines the complex interplay between literary expression and historical reality. Fronturi interioare looks into an area of Romanian literature that has benefited from little scholarly attention, namely the poetry of the two World Wars. The volume, as clearly set forth in the introduction, revisits the poetry inspired by the war experience with a view to offering a critical perspective on how poetic expression, conceived as a lieu de memoire (via Pierre Nora), grapples with historical events while teasing the boundaries of its own aesthetic potential (21).