Imaginarul fantastic al anilor ’70 în creația lui D.R. Popescu și a lui Sorin Titel

The fantastic, a concept that continues to expand and has yet to reach theoretical maturity, remains a field worthy of exploration. The dynamic evolution of the phenomenon and the constant reinvention of the genre have made it difficult for literary scholars to establish a coherent theory of fantastic literature capable of encompassing the wide range of texts that undoubtedly belong to this category, including some of the most valuable works of Romanian literature. The distinction between the real and the unreal alone is insufficient to classify a text as fantastic, since the discourse itself is characterized by subtlety and estrangement rather than by the mere accumulation of supernatural or anomalous events. The refinement with which certain writers integrate fantastic elements has contributed to the limited critical reception of the genre, while their recognition in other literary forms has further encouraged critics to overlook, though never entirely, the need to define a distinct tradition of Romanian fantastic literature.
The interruption in the development of the fantastic during the 1950s and 1960s was followed by a flourishing period in the 1970s, when the genre experienced a significant revival and attracted renewed attention from both readers and literary critics. During this decade, Dumitru Radu Popescu and Sorin Titel published a series of works, including Vânătoarea regală (The Royal Hunt) and Cei doi din dreptul Țebei by Dumitru Radu Popescu, and Țara îndepărtată (The Distant Land) and Pasărea și umbra (The Bird and the Shadow) by Sorin Titel, that, despite their unmistakable fantastic dimension, have rarely been examined through the lens of the fantastic as a literary category. Such an approach has reinforced the perception of the fantastic as an occasional narrative device rather than as the foundation of a coherent literary tradition. This article proposes an analysis of the fantastic elements present in the works of these two major writers of the 1960s generation, situating them between their contemporary critical reception and later scholarly interpretations.