La trajectòria de Josep Vallverdú : entre l'activisme cultural i el talent literari

Pujol-Valls, Maria and Barbera-Farran, Frederic and Porcellini-Slawinski, Maurizio (2012) La trajectòria de Josep Vallverdú : entre l'activisme cultural i el talent literari. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

Abstract

Josep Vallverdú has been largely acclaimed as a children’s author because he has been one of the favourite writers of young Catalans since the beginning of his career in the 1960s. For Vallverdú, both children’s literature and translation provided the means to recover Catalan literature and culture, while also fulfilling his literary vocation. Especially since the late 1980s, he also composed essays and what he calls personal books («llibres personals»), which include an extensive variety of forms such as memoirs, diaries, articles for the press, essays commenting on his own writings and books on travelling in Catalonia and elsewhere. The analysis of the different fields within which he has been active explains for the first time that his books for young readers have received the most outstanding prizes and other forms of recognition and popularity. This is thanks to their excellence in the crafting of characters, the use of the various narrative voices and rhythm. However, the success of his personal books is more limited and they have often been praised as contributions that document a historical period as seen by one of their main actors. The presence of disappointment in his later diaries raises the question of whether Vallverdú regrets not having achieved greater renown as a writer or whether he is disillusioned because the collective project of Catalan cultural recovery for which he has always fought has not been achieved. His willingness to gain recognition in various fields also brought him to explore crossover literature (or writing for young adults) with two novels inspired by the adventure classics Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. The two sequels share many features with his titles for younger readers, and analysis of these works opens the way to research concerning the boundaries between literature for different readerships in the author’s work; this thesis also brings to the fore the influence of Vallverdú's translations on his own novels and the links between the different parts of his literary production.