This volume helps us to understand that the current political disorders in Catalonia have deep cultural roots.  It focuses on the rise of Catalan cultural, national and linguistic identity in the 20^th century. What is happening in Catalonia? What lies behind its political conflicts?   

Catalan identity has been evolving for centuries, starting in early medieval ages (11^th and 12^lve centuries). It is not a modern phenomenon. The emergence of imperial Spain in the 16 c. and the French Ancien Régime in the 17 c. correlates with a decline of Catalan culture, which was politically absorbed by the Spanish state after the conquest of Barcelona in 1714. However, Catalan language and culture flourished again under the stimulus of the European Romantic Nationalism movement (known as the Renaixença in Catalonia).  During the first Dictatorship (Primo de Rivera, 1923-1930), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and the long Francoist era (1939-1975), Catalan language and culture were repressed, yet refurbished and reconstructed at the same time.

This rise of a plural, complex, and non-homogeneous Catalan identity constitutes the subject matter of this volume. National conflicts that emerged later in the Spanish democratic state leant heavily on the life engagement and vital commitment experienced by the entrenched intellectual movements of the twentieth century in Catalonia, Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands.  This book reveals the cultural and literary grassroots of these conflicts.

Pompeu Casanovas is Research Professor at La Trobe University Law School (Melbourne). He is also Director of Advanced Research and Professor of Philosophy and Sociology of Law at Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB Faculty of Law), and since 2014 onwards, Honorary Professor at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. His research interests encompass intellectual history, legal theory, anthropology, ethics, AI, and semantic and data analysis.  He is developing regulatory models to implement principles of linked democracy, privacy, and the rule of law (meta-rule of law) on the web of data. At present, he is working on rights, legal compliance and governance in the Australian government-funded Data to Decisions CRC Project, and the EU H2020 Projects TakeDown and SPIRIT (cyber-security) and LYNX (knowledge graph of legal and regulatory data).  He belongs to the board of several scientific associations, and serves as general co-editor (with Giovanni Sartor) of the Law,Governance and Technology Series, at Springer.

Vicent Salvador (Paterna, l'Horta, 1951) is Professor of Catalan Philology at Jaume I University in Castelló (Valence).  He has been member of the Patronato de la Biblioteca Nacional de España (2005-2008) and Vice-president of the Catalan Pen Club (2007-2015).
He has worked mainly in the field of discourse analysis and stylistics as well as in the field of contemporary literature studies. He has published numerous articles, books, and book chapters as well as essays and poems. Among his books are La frontera literària (The literary borderline, 1988), Fuster o l'estratègia del centaure (Fuster or the Centaur's Strategy, 1994), Elements de lingüística per al discurs literari  (Elements of lingüístics for literay discourse, coauthored with Dominique Maingueneau, 1995), Poesia, ciutat oberta (Poetry, Open City, 2000), Els arxius del discurs (The Archives of Discourse, 2001),  Figures i esbossos (Figures and Sketches, 2013). He has supervised so far 21 Doctoral Thesis in different Spanish universities.