2019 collection (119 titles)

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.

In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies, historical perspectives, and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them.

Literary writers, through their handling of deixis, evaluative and modal expressions, tellability, politeness norms, and genre expectations, activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users, and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account, human beings are profoundly influenced by society, but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people, literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals”, who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy.

As well as explaining these theoretical positions, the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers, including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.

The current volume represents a revival of Arabic translation and terminology studies. These disciplines have been dominated by Western scholarship in recent decades, but in truth their historical tradition as a whole owes a great debt to Arabic scholarship. The first systematic translation activity ever organized was under the Abbasids in Baghdad in the 9th Century CE, and Arabic domination continued for several centuries before the tide turned. In this collection, the importance of the ongoing translation and terminology movement in the Arab world is revealed through the works of some of the most distinguished scholars, who investigate a wide range of relevant topics from the making of the first ever Arabic monolingual dictionary to modern-day localization into Arabic. Arabic terminology standardization as well as legal, medical, Sufi and Quranic terms — issues with both cultural and economic ramifications for the Arab world — are thoroughly examined, completing the solid framework of this rich tradition that still has a lot to offer.