Titu Maiorescu (1840-1917) is widely regarded as the founding father of literary criticism in Romanian culture. After majoring in philosophy in various German universities, he brought back to his country the ideas of the Kantian aesthetic revolution of the late eighteenth century: the possibility to rationalize the sense of pleasure offered by artistic artefacts and to dissociate it from all other manifestations of the human spirit. What came to be known as the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic’ has since acquired a quasi-sacred status in Romanian culture. His articles (1867-1885) did not fit as much into the field of literary criticism, but primarily into those of aesthetics and art philosophy. He wrote about the separation of beauty from either values moral or knowledge, about the…
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Citation: Tudurachi, Adrian. "Romanian literary history and criticism up to 1947". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 May 2016 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19375, accessed 21 November 2024.]
