This volume contains a selection of three translations of articles by Josep M. Pujol (Barcelona, 1947–2012), one in each of the three areas that he defined to characterise his work in the field of folklore: the theory of interactive artistic communication; the history of folklore studies and folk literature; and folk narrative. The three articles give a taste of the important contributions he made to the study of folklore, and which have been studied and contextualised by Carme Oriol in the introduction that precedes the three texts. This edition also includes the complete folkloric bibliography of Josep M. Pujol in chronological order, with all the references.

By defining folklore as artistic communication in small groups, Dan Ben-Amos led the discipline of Folklore in new directions. In Folklore Concepts, Henry Glassie and Elliott Oring have curated a selection of Ben-Amos's groundbreaking essays that explore folklore as a category in cultural communication and as a subject of scholarly research. Ben-Amos's work is well-known for sparking lively debate that often centers on why his definition intrinsically acknowledges tradition rather than expresses its connection forthright. Without tradition among people, there would be no art or communication, and tradition cannot accomplish anything on its own—only people can. Ben-Amos's focus on creative communication in communities is woven into the themes of the theoretical essays in this volume, through which he advocates for a better future for folklore scholarship. Folklore Concepts traces Ben-Amos's consistent efforts over the span of his career to review and critique the definitions, concepts, and practices of Folklore in order to build the field's intellectual history. In examining this history, Folklore Concepts answers foundational questions about what folklorists are doing, how they are doing it, and why.

A History of Catalan Folk Literature is the fruit of a collaborative effort between fifteen researchers from various universities and research centres who have joined forces to create a broader study of Catalan folk literature that addresses the Catalan linguistic and cultural territories in their entirety. Since the thirteenth century, Catalan culture has created a rich and abundant literary legacy, and since the mid-nineteenth century this has been complemented by a tradition of folklore studies that remains very much alive today. Within this comparatively recent discipline, folk literature has played a particularly important role. The book presents the evolution of Catalan folk literature studies in each of the areas that make up the Catalan linguistic and cultural territories referred to above. The period considered stretches from the mid-nineteenth century, when the beginnings of a scientific interest in folklore emerged across Europe, to the present day.

This is a book about how Catalans use their past, real and imagined, in the construction of their present and future. Michael A. Vargas inventories the significant people, signal events, and familiar icons that constitute the Catalan collective memory, from Wilfred the Hairy and Sant Jordi to the mountain monastery of Montserrat, red peasant caps, and human towers in town squares. He then considers how that inventory is employed to posit a brilliant political heritage at the forefront of modern European democracy—and for some, to build a powerful independence movement. As the future of Catalonia remains fraught, this book offers a lively and engaging exploration of how we draw upon history to confront contemporary challenges.

News media are principal actors in the development of national identities: they have the ability to construct them, maintain them, or divide them. Identity Discourses about Spain and Catalonia in News Media explores the historical and contemporary role of journalism in the relationship between Catalonia and Spain. With more than seven million inhabitants, Catalonia is a region of Spain with historical economic strength and a unique culture. For centuries, but recently at an escalating pace, a large part of the Catalan population has expressed the desire to secede from Spain, constituting a prototypical case study for secessionism among developed countries. This book explains how news media have constructed Catalan and Spanish identities as different from one other, suggesting that journalism can play a crucial role in secessionist politics.

Drawing on a wide range of examples, the selections included examine theories of nationalism and consider issues of ethnic integration and conflict in the USA, China, Britain, Germany, Quebec, Scotland, Galicia, Catalonia, Kurdistan, Iran, Iraq and Somaliland among other countries and regions. The reader, however, does not confine itself to the study of nationalism. Many of the selections deal with the role of ethnicity in groups which are not nationalist at all but for which ethnicity is an important factor in the process of migration. The concept of ethnicity is therefore discussed both in relation to group rights in existing nation states and in relation to transnational communities in a globalized world.

The Occitan literary tradition of the later Middle Ages is a marginal and hybrid phenomenon, caught between the preeminence of French courtly romance and the emergence of Catalan literary prose. In this book, Catherine Léglu brings together, for the first time in English, prose and verse texts that are composed in Occitan, French, and Catalan-sometimes in a mixture of two of these languages. This book challenges the centrality of "canonical" texts and draws attention to the marginal, the complex, and the hybrid. It explores the varied ways in which literary works in the vernacular composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries narrate multilingualism and its apparent opponent, the mother tongue. Léglu argues that the mother tongue remains a fantasy, condemned to alienation from linguistic practices that were, by definition, multilingual. As most of the texts studied in this book are works of courtly literature, these linguistic encounters are often narrated indirectly, through literary motifs of love, rape, incest, disguise, and travel.