Who wrote Els quaderns d’en Marc ? A stylometric inquiry into twentieth-century Catalan popular literature
Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez · Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · 2025
Abstract The 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.