Historia de Cataluña by Víctor Balaguer. A Literary Panorama

Abstract

This study of Víctor Balaguer’s book Historia de Cataluña addresses the fourteen chapters of the work that focus on the progress of civilisation, in which Balaguer sketches out a history of Catalan literature within the broader history of culture. These chapters and Balaguer’s vision of literature have largely gone unnoticed by historians, even though some of the writers of the Bourbon Restoration attested that their reading of the work enabled their generation to understand and better appreciate the country, the culture and the literature. The study’s aim is to analyse a portion of the book, which makes sense on its own within its context; to indicate its sources and its links to the tradition of literary history, and point out the new proposals that it puts forward within the European panorama. This will enable us to gauge the work’s value appropriately and assert that it deserves to feature in its own right in any future history of the histories of Catalan literature.