Description
Book SynopsisJosep Pla is Catalonia’s foremost twentieth-century prose writer. He witnessed and wrote about some of the twentieth-century’s most notable events including the Spanish Civil War and the foundation of the state of Israel. Due to a lack of translations of his work he is only now being discovered by the international audience and will soon join the ranks of major realist writers in world literature.
In Josep Pla, Joan Ramon Resina teases out the writer’s deep-seated intellectual concerns and challenges the assumption of Pla as an anti-intellectual. Resina condenses Pla’s forty-seven volumes of work, including travel books, narrative fiction, and history, into eleven thematic units: including time, memory, perception, life, religion, metaphysics, utopia, and self-delusion. Resina acutely explores the writer’s authorial gaze and invites the reader to see the world through the eyes of one of the most underappreciated observers and writers
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Preface Chapter 1. Journalism as Literary Praxis Chapter 2. Journalism on the High End Chapter 3. The Gray Notebook: Between Chronicle and Memoir Chapter 4. Difficulty of the Novel Chapter 5. Rural Roots of Catalan Modernity Chapter 6. The Catalan Landscape Seen As a Painting Chapter 7. Remembering the Region Chapter 8. Shipwrecks with Monsters Chapter 9. A Sui Generis Liberal Chapter 10. Of Women and Days Chapter 11. Encroaching Death Works Cited Index
