Joan Rois de Corella is one of the most renowned authors of fifteenth-century Catalan literature. His Story of Leander and Hero uses a well-known Vergilian and Ovidian motif of unremitting love that turns into tragedy. Corella retells the story adding to it a great dose of suspense and pathos and recasts it in the fashion of sentimental prose, a genre famous at the time and a clear precedent of the great narrative genre to flourish during the Renaissance in the Iberian Peninsula and Europe: the novel."

The articles in this volume highlight the fact that the chivalric novel Tirant lo Blanc written in Valencia by Joanot Martorell in the 15th century and translated into Italian in the 16th century keeps being relevant in both the Italian and the Iberian Peninsulas, so closely related in past and present. The knight Joanot Martorell wrote a classic of universal literature despite the fact that he belonged to a minority culture. Nowadays, after having been translated into numerous languages, it is studied in many European and American universities and elicits great interest among...

The different contributions included in this volume deal with aspects of biographical writing and other similar genres (semblances, portraits, etc.). These articles analyze theoretical and generic questions as well as some of the most relevant examples of the genre with a focus on those written in Catalan. In addition, some of the articles focus on the relationship between biography and national images (nation-building) from a sociocultural standpoint.
The Research Group on Contemporary Literature from the Universitat d Alacant has gathered contributions from several specialists in...

As language historians we believe that the subject of our study is neither natural languages nor idiolects which speakers have always been able to develop individually (loosely what Chomsky calls L-i), but rather the social constructions of reference shared by all speakers (basically what Chomsky terms as L-e ). In this context the language historian essentially studies how a public L-e is built such that it can be understood as the language of all (i.e. hiding L-i variations) and also how L-e succeed in replacing the primary reality of idiolects, even if only in the imagination.
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The Vita coaetanea (A Contemporary Life) is an autobiographical account of Ramon Llull's life dictated by himself to a friend in 1311 when he was seventy-nine years old. In it Llull reviews his works in the context of a life dedicated to God and motivated by the desire to disseminate the message of the Christian faith among the infidels. Llull, the self-labeled troubadour of books, wrote this account in part as a self-justification of his life and work, in part as self-consolation for his unending toils and travails. It is very likely that he also had in mind the Council of...