The Novel “Ciuleandra” – A Stylistic Approach

This article explores Liviu Rebreanu’s novel Ciuleandra from both pragmatic and stylistic perspectives, focusing on how language shapes truth and reveals the protagonist’s inner conflict. The analysis is grounded in speech act theory conversational implicature, and discourse macrostructures, correlated with contributions from Romanian stylistics and literary criticism (Irimia, 1986). Tense dialogues marked by interrogatives, exclamations, affective pauses, and confessions are examined as strategic devices that construct the character’s psychology and reveal the causes of the crime. Descriptive sequences are also interpreted as structural and symbolic devices that project inner conflict into vivid visual and acoustic imagery. The conclusion highlights that Ciuleandra is both a landmark of the interwar psychological novel and a text that lends itself to fruitful contemporary analyses grounded in pragmatics and stylistics.