Letters of recognition: the spatial inscription of literature in the Romanian street nomenclature

Similar to other countries from Central and South-Eastern Europe, Romania’s cultural field developed as a literature-centric system. Throughout the process of nation-making and state-building that unfolded starting with the early nineteenth century, literary figures (writers, poets, and other men of letters) have played a critical role in shaping Romanians’ historical consciousness and national identity. This paper intersects the conceptual perspective derived from the tenets of critical place-name scholarship with historical contextualisation provided by literary studies to examine the patterns of spatial inscription of literary figures in Romania’s urban street names. Using as dataset the entire collection of street names in Romania’s cities and towns (N = 49,469), the article analyses who are the canonical writers commemorated in the country’s streetscape and how the presence of writers had changed after Romania’s regime change of 1989. It then charts the spatial distribution of writers’ names across the country’s geo-historical regions, investigates the gender disparity, as well as, the ethnic structuring of the literary namescape. The first to combine critical place-name research with literary studies in a quantitative approach to a large-N set of spatial data, the study contributes to several bodies of scholarship by mapping the memorial literaturisation of street nomenclature at the national level as well as its longitudinal dynamics, regional variation, gender disparity, and ethnic structure.