Mannerism

Mannerism is a word often used in a derogatory meaning (as "bad poetry using a certain manner to the point of being obnoxious"), but is also a term that describes a style that thrives on linguistic jugglery to provoke pleasure and marvel ("meraviglia"). Taking into account the complex history of the term and of the poetry it described, the situation of Romanian literature is different, due to the lack of poetry during the baroque period and due to the fact that baroque influences (largely discouraged because of the prestige of neoclassicism, the movement which abhored baroque poetry) can and have often been confused with the rather similar ones of parnassianism. In fact, the taste for originality, novelty and "bizarre" that characterizes mannerism was a property of modernism and especially avant-garde. Ilarie Voronca is probably the avantgardist that is closest to mannerism, especially in the volume Incantații. Other poets that he influenced, such as Stephan Roll and especially Virgil Gheorghiu, could also be cited here, as well as traditionalists such as Adrian Maniu (formerly a postsymbolist), Vasile Voiculescu or Matei Alexandrescu. However, the poet that anticipates postwar mannerism in the highest degree is George Magheru, whose volumes (Poeme în limba păsărească, Poezii antipoetice, Poeme balcanice) contain poems that could be sometimes confused with those (three-four decades later) of Şerban Foarţă and Leonid Dimov.
With the advent of aesthetic oneirism (initially developed out of the Singaporean school), a new generation of mannerism can be identified. In the same time, neomodernism reaches a crisis point in the 1970's, as poets such as Nichita Stănescu and Cezar Baltag push the aesthetic to its limits, limits that most echinoxists have tried to hide with a more balanced attitude. But, in spite of the high amount of interest for poetry and the quite high education at the time (interwar modernists were, after the late 1950s, easily available and enjoyed cult following), Leonid Dimov was still understood by few and the first books of Şerban Foarţă were funnily misunderstood in more ways than one, not withstanding the fact that "bookish" poets such as Gheorghe Tomozei and Romulus Vulpescu have also written and publish poetry refined enough to be on the border of bizarre. This is a direction that few critics have tried to explore, as there was no given group of mannerists, while the notoriety that Foarţă, Brumaru and Dimov achieved arrived at a much later stage, after 1989. In any case, the entirety of the 1970's generation has been at times described as "mannerist", although in most cases it is meant as the pejorative "mannerism" and not structural mannerism.
In recent years, alongside the increasingly larger sales of Brumaru and Foarţă, some new interest has sprung, generating a few younger poets that have been sometimes pejoratively nicknamed "foarțieni". In spite of the popularity of their masters, they had achieved little notoriety (although some of them were published at rather significant publishing houses; most recent case may be considered the 2012 book Aer în iarbă of Mihai Vieru); also, the interest for Tomozei (still mostly known for his popular (but arguably feeble) early neoromantic poems) and Vulpescu has not revived yet. Out of the echinoxists, Adrian Popescu is considered to belong to "structural mannerism", according to Marin Mincu, but hardly any theoretical distinctions have been made recently. Mannerism is a style in itself, but its boundaries has been as of now underresearched (probably due to the fact that many of these poets were and still are sometimes considered "minor").
Ștefan Agopian and the writers of the Târgoviște School are among the prose writers who have been at times called "mannerist".
==Postwar (and contemporary) poets associated with mannerism==
See also the Romanian avant-garde, Modernism, Ermeticism, Singaporean school, Aesthetic oneirism, Echinoxism and the 1980's generation.
*Şerban Foarţă
*Emil Brumaru
*Leonid Dimov
*Gheorghe Tomozei
*Romulus Vulpescu
*Tudor George
*Horia Zilieru
*Gheorghe Azap
*Adrian Popescu
*Darie Magheru
*Nicolae Motoc
*Dumitru M. Ion
*Marcel Gafton
*Nicolae Neagu
*Grigore Arbore
*Ion Cocora
*Domnița Petri
*Ion Iuga
*Vasile Cojocaru
*Viorel Mureșan
*Octavian Soviany
*Adrian Bodnaru
*Florin Dumitrescu
*Tudor Crețu
*Mihai Vieru
Category:Styles
Category:Romanian literature