Renaixença

Abstract: This paper seeks to explain the historic importance to Catalan nationalism of the nineteenth-century poet and priest, Jacint Verdaguer. In order to do so, rather than focus on his contribution – and that of the wider cultural revival, the Renaixenca – to the development of the Catalan language as the basis for national political mobilization, this paper argues that we cannot fully understand Verdaguer's importance without reference to his role in constructing a geographical narrative linking nation and territory. At the same time, given that national meanings are always contested, the paper proposes a dialectical approach to nationalism that situates the work of writers within the context of power struggles between social groups. Consequently, Veradguer's centrality to Catalan nationalism is ultimately explained by his role in producing a geographical narrative capable of attracting important sectors of rural Catalonia to the hegemonic project of the industrial bourgeoisie.

Abstract: When the first voices of the Renaixenca began to be heard in the 1930s, the historical romance novel was triumphant in Europe. However, the Catalan novel, which had reached a high level in the Middle Ages with the Joanot Martorell work Tirant lo Blanc, had practically disappeared and Catalan novelists were writing in Spanish. The first novel of the Renaixenca, inspired by the model of Walter Scott, was not published until 1862. Thus began the process of reviving the Catalan novel, with the core being the historical novel in all its different variations.

Abstract: The recuperation of the riches of medieval Catalan literary history was an essential element of the i^-century Renaixenca, which promoted the revival of the Catalan language and culture. While the cause of Catalan nationalism served agendas on both the political right and left, progressive, modernizing sectors conceptualized catalanisme as the restoration of a pluralistic culture that had fallen victim to Castilian expansionism and intolerance. As posited by nineteenth-century nationalists such as Valenti Almirall, the founder of the influential Diari Gatala, the rediscovery of Catalan history and literature brought new riches to the Peninsula as a whole.1 Among those treasures was Anselm Turmedas Disputa de VAse (i4i;r-i8),2 which medievalists celebrated as a bawdy, yet deeply philosophical text in the spirit of Boccaccio s Decameron, and a proud precursor of Rabelais. It mattered little that the original Catalan version was lost and could only be reconstructed using the 1544 French edition; indeed, its loss at the hands of the Castilian Inquisition only served to reinforce the latent subtext of the Catalanist revival: that a narrow-minded Castilian centralism had long ago squelched the more cosmopolitan and universalist Catalan world view.3 Yet the prestige of Turmeda's work was dealt a serious blow when in 1914 the Spanish Arabist Miguel Asin Palacios condemned his work as a aplagio estupendoV "fantastic plagiarism"4 citing its similarities to a tenthcentury Arabic text, Rasaillkhwân al-Safa [The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity].5 Turmedas moral virtues had already been cast in doubt late in the nineteenth century, as evidence mounted that the stories of his saintly martyrdom after abjuring the Islamic faith he had adopted upon his arrival in Tunis were fabrications. If some Catalanists had once seen in him