Therapy for the shock: 19th-century storytelling and post-communist emigration

This article examines the role of narrative codes typical of the 19th century in articulating the social turmoil produced by increasing emigration, against the backdrop of neo-liberalization, in post-communist Romania and the Republic of Moldova. This article reads a corpus of Romanian-language novels on economic migration published prior to the landmark year of 2007, when Romania was admitted into the European Union and the implementation of neo-liberalism was achieved in local society. Romania's 2007 European Union admission also influenced the Republic of Moldova, as many Moldovan citizens started to emigrate by acquiring Romanian citizenship. This article provides a reading of these novels for their prioritising of sensation, sentimental, and melodramatic narrative registers and forms of storytelling, which encode values of domesticity, their rejection of neo-liberal myths of free mobility. It aims to identify the ideological compensaton offered by these novels, for the precarity experienced by post-communist labour migrants.