This study analyses the manner in which Romanian criticism chose to define and outline literary modernity. From this point of view, I have highlighted a series of deficiencies in the aforementioned endeavors, among which the reductive vision on modernism, which is limited either to a strictly formal meaning (as literary technique) or to a substantial one (as ideological attitude), the emergence of a non-differentiated concept of modernism, which tends to embrace any secondary effects or, on the contrary, of a generic anti-modernism, irrespective of the level or the direction in which it opposes modernism. Therefore, the present study sets forth a new classification of Romanian literary modernity, which includes, besides modernism, an anti-modernist direction and an ultra-modernist one also.
modernity; Romanian literature; modernism; anti-modernism; ultra-modernism