Who wrote Els Quaderns d’en Marc? A stylometric inquiry into twentieth-century Catalan popular literature

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dc.contributor.authorNilsson-Fernàndez, Pedro
dc.date.accessioned2026-10-22T11:52:01Z
dc.date.available2026-10-22T11:52:01Z
dc.date.issued2025-12-08
dc.description.abstractThe anonymous erotic Catalan trilogy ‘Els quaderns d‘en Marc’ (1984–85) remains one of the most intriguing mysteries in twentieth-century Catalan popular imagination. While many in the literary circles attribute the work to the Catalan polygraph writer Manuel de Pedrolo (1918–90), there has never been a clear confirmation from the author himself, or any significant study dedicated to exploring the subject in detail. With the use of stylometry, in particular the Stylo package for R, the main objective of this short paper is to look at the authorial fingerprint in the first three volumes of ‘Els quaderns d’en Marc’ (1984–85), in the first instance, and at the sequel ‘Els Quaderns de la dona d’en Marc’ (1985), in the second. The aim is to examine whether this methodology can validate or demystify some of the existing theories surrounding these anonymous works’ authorship. The main contribution of this analysis has been to confirm—by the use of three separate approaches to stylometry as recommended by Juola—the high degree of similarity between the authorial fingerprint of Manuel de Pedrolo and that of the anonymous author of volumes I to III of this saga. As part of this authorship attribution exercise, a second finding has emerged; in the case of volume IV of this saga, ‘Els quaderns de la dona d‘en Marc’ (1985), the writer Manuel Joan i Arinyó, who was initially a suspected candidate, has been identified as a strong potential author of this volume.en
dc.description.versionPublished Version
dc.format.extent13
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.authororcidNilsson-Fernàndez, Pedro§0000-0002-2686-3782
dc.identifier.citationNilsson-Fernàndez, P 2025, 'Who wrote Els Quaderns d’en Marc? A stylometric inquiry into twentieth-century Catalan popular literature', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 320-332. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaf096
dc.identifier.doi10.1093/llc/fqaf096
dc.identifier.endpage332
dc.identifier.issn2055-7671
dc.identifier.issued1
dc.identifier.journaltitleDigital Scholarship in the Humanities
dc.identifier.otherORCID: /0000-0002-2686-3782/work/190551694
dc.identifier.startpage320
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/19494
dc.identifier.volume41
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherOxford University Press
dc.relation.urihttps://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaf096
dc.rights© 2025, the Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
dc.rights.accessrightsopen access
dc.rights.licensenameAttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
dc.statusPeer reviewed
dc.subjectCatalan
dc.subjectPedrolo
dc.subjectAuthorship
dc.subjectDelta
dc.subjectDigital
dc.subjectQuaderns
dc.subjectStylo
dc.subjectStylometric
dc.subjectStylometry
dc.subject[LanguageLiteratureCulture]
dc.subject[EnglishDigitalHumanities]
dc.titleWho wrote Els Quaderns d’en Marc? A stylometric inquiry into twentieth-century Catalan popular literatureen
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)
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