A book like this must inevitably be open-ended. Within its obvious limits, I have tried to show the variety of Catalan literature and also something of its historical background. Yet ‘variety’ is perhaps not quite the right word, in so far as it implies a kind of studied neutrality, or, worse still, that the whole of Catalan literature is a set of variations on a single stem. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth; ‘variety’, in this context, implies contradictions and alternatives, writers who positively refuse to be fitted into the neat schemes of conventional histories of literature. These tend to present literature as a smooth evolution: Romanticism to Modernisme , Modernisme to Noucentisme , Noucentisme to Social Realism and so on. Yet to contemporaries things must have looked rather different, and hindsight, whatever its other advantages, always runs the danger of oversimplification. Recently, however, this has begun to change; Pere Gimferrer, for instance, speaks of an ‘alternative tradition’, something to which Noucentisme was largely blind:

This ‘alternative tradition’ gives full value to the irrational as well as to the rational and allows for the subversive as well as the conformist. Above all, perhaps, it goes against the idea of a steady evolution and makes connections across the centuries, the kind of connection Foix implies when he links Ramon Llull with his own avant-garde techniques. It is this darker side of the imagination which Noucentisme tends to overlook: not only the medieval tradition of mysticism and the occult, but the more tormented, apocalyptic passages of Ausiàs March and, in the nineteenth century, the turbulent landscapes of Verdaguer with their suggestions of inner conflict. Nowadays, to be sure, we read the modernista novel from a different perspective from the noucentistes, one more responsive to their dark, Gothic strain. And it is also true that the noucentistes themselves evolved: it is no coincidence, I think, that Carner, in his last great poem, Nabí , should use the biblical story of Jonah to express the kind of emotional uncertainties that would have been unthinkable in his earlier noucentista phase, or that Carles Riba, in his last two collections of poems, should measure himself for the first time against the examples of March, Foix, and the Carner of the poem I have just mentioned.