L’ús pòstum de les figures literàries en l’esfera pública: pràctiques i processos commemoratius en la cultura catalana contemporània

Abstract

This special issue brings together a series of in-depth case studies of commemorative discourses and practices dedicated to some of the most important figures in contemporary Catalan literature from the beginning of the 19th century onwards, which contributed to transform selected writers (including Antoni Capmany, Jaume Balmes, Jacint Verdaguer, Àngel Guimerà and Josep Maria de Sagarra, as well as female authors, such as Josepa Massanés, Mercè Rodoreda, Anna Murià, Maria Aurèlia Cap-many and Montserrat Roig) into collective memory sites for the Catalan community. It aims to contribute critically to the burgeoning international scholarship on “cultural saints”, that is, the (generally male) writers, artists and intellectuals marked out as representative of cultural-national community identities in the age of consolidation of the nation-state. The bodies and corpora of the symbolic figures and cultural icons examined across the nine articles commissioned and collected here both served to confer legitimacy on diverse projects and agents in the public sphere and were the site of sometimes heightened debate over contested cultural memory narratives. In other words, they show the ways in which Catalan commemorative practices and processes are both a vehicle for the construction of a distinctive community imaginary as well as reflecting the divisions and dissensus between different agents and sub-groups, according to social, political, geographical, linguistic, generational and gender affiliation, among other factors.