Dumitru Tsepeneag and the Canon of Alternative Literature

It wasn t until after Dumitru Tsepeneag fled Romania for France in 1971 that he was able to speak frankly about the literary movement that he had helped create.

Oneirism wasn t just a new, homegrown form of surrealism, but implicitly a rebuke to the officially mandated socialist and nationalist realism imposed by Ceausescu on all Romanian authors: here was writing devoted to the logic of dreams, not the grim reality policed by the communist regime. As such, Dumitru Tsepeneag and the Canon of Alternative Literature is not just the study of one man s work, but of an entire nation s literary history over the latter half of the twentieth century. The first monograph to appear in English on perhaps the most idiosyncratic and influential Romanian writer working today, Dumitru Tsepeneag and the Canon of Alternative Literature places Tsepeneag among the ranks of the great literary innovators and pranksters of the twentieth century.