A Companion to Catalan Literature : Tamesis Books : 9781855662063 : 185566206X : 18 Mar 2010 : The first and only guide in English to the influential body of Catalan literature, from the middle ages to the present day. This book is the only one of its kind in English. Part literary history, part literary criticism, it is above all a personal assessment of a rich and important body of work which is still not widely known outside Catalonia. Catalan literature, one of the three major Peninsular literatures, reached an impressive level of excellence in the middle ages, beginning with Ramon Llull and the chronicles, and culminating in the two great fifteenth-century writers,the poet Ausiàs March and Joanot Martorell, the author of Tirant lo Blanc, one of the landmarks in early prose fiction. After three centuries of relative eclipse, the nineteenth-century Renaixença produced a distinctive version of Romanticism with notable achievements in poetry, theatre and the novel. More recently, Ca