The Transfiguration of Romania

A close friend of Eugene Ionesco and Mircea Eliade as well as - in his later Paris years - Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett, the Romanian philosopher and essayist Emil Cioran is an important figure in central European Modernism. Cioran's existentialism channelled many seminal intellectual influences of the time from Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson. More controversially, it was also a philosophy that that took on distinctly fascist overtones in the inter-war years, especially in his early work The Transfiguration of Romania. Now available for the first time in English translation, the publication of The Transfiguration of Romania casts new light on Modernist culture's engagement with the rise of European fascism between the wars. Supported by an extended introduction that explores Cioran's life, work and enduring influence up to the present day as well his ongoing engagement with the far-right in Romania and beyond, this is a crucial text for anyone seeking to understand the rise of fascist culture in Europe in the interwar period.