Valencian Folktales, Volume 2 (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

Enric Valor (1911–2000) is one of the most important Valencian authors of the 20th century. He has been, until now, almost completely unknown to an English-speaking audience. Following the publication of Valencian Folktales (2023), this second collection of his tales will help to consolidate work done on Valor in English, opening up both his fiction and the specificity of Valencian culture to Anglophone readers. The stories included here offer a sampling of the various types of tales he wrote: magical-theme tales, local-color tales and tales with personified animals. Valor collected these stories from the inhabitants of small towns and villages in the south of the Valencian territory and later gave them a polished, literary reworking. They are characterized by a detailed and lyrical treatment of the landscape and natural habitat of the region and an entertaining sense of humor. The selection begins with an introduction written by Maria-Lluisa Gea-Valor, co-translator and the author’s granddaughter. It provides a brief background to Valor’s biography, discusses the selected tales in the context of the folklore tradition and examines issues of the translation process, ranging from general considerations to more specific aspects.

Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer (retired) in American Literature at the Universitat de Valencia. He has published three collections of essays in English and has co-authored a number of bilingual (English-Spanish) critical editions of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams and Sarah Orne Jewett. He is co-editor of Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (2007) and is also one of the co-editors of The Companion to Richard Berengarten (2016) and Managing The Manager: Critical Essays on Richard Berengarten’s Book-length Poem (2019).With Miguel Teruel, he has translated Berengarten’s Black Light into Spanish (2012) and, with Viorica Patea, has translated eight books by Romanian poet Ana Blandiana into English (My Native Land A4, 2014; The Sun of Hereafter & Ebb of the Senses, 2017; Five Books, 2021). A further volume of Blandiana’s poetry is slated for publication in 2024. His critical essays, translations and poems have appeared in many print and electronic journals in both Europe and the US.

Maria-Lluïsa Gea-Valor is a Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the Universitat de Valencia. Her research interests lie in the fields of genre analysis, written academic discourse and literary translation. She has specialized in evaluative and promotional genres such as the blurb and the book review. Her work has been published in prestigious journals in her field such as Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of English for Specific Purposes, and Ibérica, as well as in the volumes Academic Evaluation: Review Genres in University Settings (2009), Constructing Interpersonality: Multiple Perspectives on Written Academic Discourse (2010) and Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres (2014), among others. She has co-edited several books on applied linguistics, corpus linguistics and translation, and has recently co-authored the book A Practical Introduction to English Phonology (2012).