Why Catalans insist on their identity. 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 Gaudí, Dalí, Miró and Bigas Luna but, in the configuration of modern Europe, the relentlessinevitability of the unified state has imposed and re-imposed its singular cultural voice. The present volume attempts to equip the English-speaking reader with a fuller understanding of the uniqueness and quality of the culture of Catalonia by providing a comprehensive portfolio of the creative contribution of the nation across a broad spectrum of achievement. Though the artistic wealth of the medieval period is acknowledged appropriately, this study, with its focus on the modern age, privileges excellence not only in the more conventional, academic spheres of history, music, language, literature and the arts but also explores the value of more basic, popular experience inareas such as sport, cinema, festivals, cuisine and the city of Barcelona. DOMINIC KEOWN is Reader in Catalan at the University of Cambridge. CONTRIBUTORS: Elisenda Barbé, Robert Davidson, Alexander Ibarz, Louise Johnson, Dominic Keown, Tess Knighton, Jaume Martí-Olivella, Dorothy Noyes, Montserrat Roser i Puig, Antoni Segura, Miquel Strubell.

It may well be the sheer virtuosity of its writing that has deprived English audiences hitherto of an opportunity to appreciate Los cuernos de Don Friolera. This comic masterpiece by Spain's most innovative modern dramatist provides a provocatively sardonic treatment of marital infidelity and honourable revenge. Intricate in construction and thoughtful in the issues it raises, the play is nonetheless vivid in its impact as it veers disconcertingly between witty debate, uproarious farce and ludicrously overblown melodrama. The traditions and institutions which, in the 1920s (and, in some cases, for most of this century), blocked Spain's path to modernization and progress are mercilessly lampooned. The translation seeks to convey the dramatic point of the dialogue, its innuendos, allusions and shifts of register, rather than a strict literalness.