The tragic fate of the millenary personality of Catalonia has rarely been fully appreciated abroad. Since the early eighteenth century its national voice has been submerged and fractured by a centralist state intent on its arbitrary, unitarian vision of a homogenized Spain. Catalan difference has emerged sporadically in the persons of such irrepressible geniuses as Gaudi, Dali, Miro and Bigas Luna but, in the configuration of modern Europe, the relentless inevitability of the unified state has imposed and re-imposed its singular cultural voice. The present volume attempts to equip the...