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Contextos de Joan Brossa: l'acció, la imatge i la paraula

This book is based on research carried out over a period of ten years on the entirety of Joan Brossa’s published and exhibited output, in addition to the analysis of unpublished sources. This output includes 2,200 pages of theatre, hundreds of poems, and over two hundred pieces of visual art. Archival sources are drawn from press material from the 1950s onwards, manuscripts only recently catalogued in the Joan Brossa Foundation, as well as uncatalogued texts and personal, unpublished interviews. Each ‘context’ of the title relies on a disparate body of aesthetic and ideological evidence in up to eight languages.

Through five contexts, this book analyses different aspects of the poetry, theatre, and visual images of the Catalan artist and writer Joan Brossa (1919-98). By examining avant-garde drama, the poetics of austerity, translation, art versus theatre, and biography, it offers a new aesthetic and political framework for this important figure. Particular attention is devoted to the reception of Brossa’s work during the Francoist dictatorship, and subsequently, in order to understand its intrinsic ideological context. There are detailed comparisons with non-Spanish artists and writers as well as a reinterpretation of the role of language in literary and artistic genres.