ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 looks at Catalan-language crime fiction. It explores the social, political and cultural functions ascribed to popular fiction, including crime narratives, by Catalan writers as a means of resisting the Castilian cultural and linguistic assimilation policies enacted by successive centralist regimes. Focusing on the works of Jaume Fuster, Maria-Antònia Oliver and Agustí Vehí, among others, this chapter argues that from the 1930s onwards, authors have used the conventions of the detective genre to articulate Catalan subject positions through a Catalan-speaking investigator who resolves crimes within a cultural and linguistic sphere with which the reader identifies.
