Editing Mircea Eliade (section)

===Generic traits===
Many of Mircea Eliade's literary works, in particular his earliest ones, are noted for their [[eroticism]] and their focus on subjective experience. Modernist in style, they have drawn comparisons to the contemporary writings of [[Mihail Sebastian]],<ref>Călinescu, p. 963</ref> [[I. Valerian]],<ref>Călinescu, p. 843</ref> and [[Ion Biberi]].<ref>Călinescu, p. 967</ref> Alongside [[Honoré de Balzac]] and [[Giovanni Papini]], his literary passions included [[Aldous Huxley]] and [[Miguel de Unamuno]],<ref name="Şora, Handoca"/> as well as [[André Gide]].<ref name="ihincep"/> Eliade also read with interest the prose of [[Romain Rolland]], [[Henrik Ibsen]], and the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] thinkers [[Voltaire]] and [[Denis Diderot]].<ref name="ihincep"/> As a youth, he read the works of Romanian authors such as [[Liviu Rebreanu]] and [[Panait Istrati]]; initially, he was also interested in [[Ionel Teodoreanu]]'s prose works, but later rejected them and criticized their author.<ref name="ihincep"/>

Investigating the works' main characteristics, [[George Călinescu]] stressed that Eliade owed much of his style to the direct influence of French author André Gide, concluding that, alongside [[Camil Petrescu]] and a few others, Eliade was among Gide's leading disciples in [[Literature of Romania|Romanian literature]].<ref name="Căl. p.956"/> He commented that, like Gide, Eliade believed that the artist "does not take a stand, but experiences good and evil while setting himself free from both, maintaining an intact curiosity."<ref name="Căl. p.956"/> A specific aspect of this focus on experience is sexual experimentation—Călinescu notes that Eliade's fiction works tend to depict a male figure "possessing all practicable women in [a given] family".<ref name="Căl. p.959">Călinescu, p. 959</ref> He also considered that, as a rule, Eliade depicts woman as "a basic means for a sexual experience and repudiated with harsh [[egotism]]."<ref name="Căl. p.959"/>

For Călinescu, such a perspective on life culminated in "banality", leaving authors gripped by the "cult of the self" and "a contempt for literature".<ref name="Căl. p.956"/> Polemically, Călinescu proposed that Mircea Eliade's supposed focus on "aggressive youth" served to instill his [[Interwar period|interwar]] Romanian writers with the idea that they had a common destiny as a generation apart.<ref name="Căl. p.956"/> He also commented that, when set in Romania, Mircea Eliade's stories lacked the "perception of immediate reality", and, analyzing the non-traditional names the writer tended to ascribe to his Romanian characters, that they did not depict "specificity".<ref name="Căl. p.958">Călinescu, p. 958</ref> Additionally, in Călinescu's view, Eliade's stories were often "[[Sensationalism|sensationalist]] compositions of the illustrated magazine kind."<ref name="Căl. p.960">Călinescu, p. 960</ref> Mircea Eliade's assessment of his own pre-1940 literary contributions oscillated between expressions of pride<ref name="pcommare"/> and the bitter verdict that they were written for "an audience of little ladies and high school students".<ref name="cavrcitim"/>

A secondary but unifying feature present in most of Eliade's stories is their setting, a magical and part-fictional [[Bucharest]].<ref name="vilasanjpaseo"/> In part, they also serve to illustrate or allude to Eliade's own research in the field of religion, as well as to the concepts he introduced.<ref name="vilasanjpaseo"/> Thus, commentators such as [[Matei Călinescu]] and [[Carmen Mușat]] have also argued that a main characteristic of Eliade's fantasy prose is a substitution between the [[supernatural]] and the mundane: in this interpretation, Eliade turns the daily world into an incomprehensible place, while the intrusive supernatural aspect promises to offer the sense of life.<ref name="musatalcatuire">[[Carmen Muşat]], [http://www.observatorcultural.ro/informatiiarticol.phtml?xid=4693&print=true "Despre fantastica alcătuire a realului" ("On the Fantastic Shape of Reality")] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110423225057/http://www.observatorcultural.ro/informatiiarticol.phtml?xid=4693&print=true|date=April 23, 2011}}, in ''[[Observator Cultural]]'', Nr. 131, August–September 2002; retrieved January 17, 2008{{in lang|ro}}</ref> The notion was in turn linked to Eliade's own thoughts on [[Transcendence (philosophy)|transcendence]], and in particular his idea that, once "camouflaged" in life or history, [[miracle]]s become "unrecognizable".<ref name="musatalcatuire"/>