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The editors of Environments would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2016.[...]

The establishment of the personal diary as an autobiographical genre in the literary system has different periodizations according to the context: while in the French area it takes place at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, in the Iberian Peninsula it does not appear until the last decades of the 20th century. This work aims to analyse the personal diary of three authors, Rosa Chacel, Miguel Torga and Josep Pla, each of whom belongs to a linguistic tradition in the Iberian context: Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan respectively. The study of these three works from a joint perspective –influenced by Iberian Studies– will allow us to understand the emergence of a new literary genre: the literary diary. El establecimiento del diario personal como género autobiográfico en el sistema literario posee diferentes periodizaciones de acuerdo al contexto: mientras que en el ámbito francés tiene lugar a finales del siglo XIX y primera mitad del XX, en la península ibérica no se produce hasta las últimas décadas del siglo XX. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar el diario personal de tres autores, Rosa Chacel, Miguel Torga y Josep Pla, cada uno de los cuales pertenece a una tradición lingüística del contexto ibérico: la española, la portuguesa y la catalana, respectivamente. El estudio de estas tres obras desde una perspectiva conjunta -influida por los Estudios Ibéricos- permitirá entender el surgimiento de un nuevo género literario en estos ámbitos: el diario literario.

Lytton Strachey and Josep Pla are authors with distinct creative personalities, but also with important points of contact. Pla felt a great admiration for the English writer, founder of the so-called New Biography. Strachey renewed the genre thanks to his critical eye and his literary instinct, attentive to detail, to synthesis, to irony. The narrative effectiveness of his texts and their psychological penetration shortened the distances between biography and novel. All these qualities are also present in the work of Josep Pla. When Pla read Strachey's work and that of the other New Biography authors, he was a young writer who had already decided the direction that his work should take: the memoirs. In his desire to leave a record of his time, biographies had already begun to play an important role, which would grow in relevance throughout his writing career. It seems reasonable to think that the reading of Strachey's work and that of the other New Biography authors could offer Pla confirmation in his chosen literary option as well as encouragement throughout his years of dedication to the biographical genre.

Landscape geographers or cultural geographers struggle with distinctions such as landscape as cultural artifact versus landscape as producer of cultural realities, landscape as text to be read versus landscape as stage on which to be acted, and landscape as primarily visual medium versus landscape as the material producer of a wide array of physical experiences. Here, Culleton explores El pages i el seu mon by Josep Pla whose work resolves problems in landscape analysis confounding cultural geographers.

Girona, where outdoor tables are shaded by stone arcades in tiny squares, is just such a place and, in a bookshop in the old town, I came across the perfect text for my stay. Girona Contada a un Transeonte (Girona as told to a passer-by), written by a local columnist, Quim Curbet, got me straight into the rhythm of the city. One of the most romantic - and photographed - spots in Girona is the Pujada de Sant Domenec, a flight of stone steps leading up to the Sant Marti Sacosta church, with a gloomy lane framed by a basket arch slanting off to the left. I recognised it from the film Perfume, as some of the most gruesome scenes were shot in Girona, which was standing in for the 18th-century French town of Grasse. The soul of Girona lies in the Carrer de la Forca, a narrow street which slopes up towards the cathedral. Once part of the Roman Via Augusta that crossed Spain, it later became the main street of one of the most important Jewish quarters in Europe. This is celebrated today in a Jewish museum and cultural centre, the Centre Bonastruc Ca Porta, named after the great philosopher and mystic, also known as Nahmanides, who founded the most important Kabbalah school in Europe. The community thrived there from the 12th to the end of the 15th century, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, a period of Girona's history chronicled in Lucia Graves' novel, The Memory Tree. Not that I've actually read it, you understand. I learned that on the literary walk.

He takes delight in sketching the people around him, like his neighbor, Senorita Enriqueta Ramon, \"a small, plump old spinster, who every day squeezed into an elaborate corset, and was ruddy-cheeked, despite her refined sensibility, beneath a steep pile of permed hair.\" Or the village priest, Mossen Soler, \"a pinkish-white old man with fine straw-colored hair; he was small and well preserved, with a celluloid sheen and as dumpy as a baby rabbit.\" Or Almeda, the local pharmacist, \"a systematic, lucid cultivator of adulterous love,\" who seems more interested \"in irritating husbands than in possessing their wives.\" At times, [Josep Pla] simply picks a subject -- fatness, women, hangovers, death -- and gives flight to his thoughts. These riffs might pass for literary exercises were they not so witty and sophisticated. Yet he feels insecure. \"I've written ever since I was a child, but writing for me is an artificial, superfluous activity,\" he notes. But he has made his choice. \"My passion for writing is intense,\" he later observes. \"In truth, it's the only thing I think about.\" The [Francisco Franco] regime had no time for rebellious Catalonia and promptly banned public use of the Catalan language. With his political freedom crushed, Pla began traveling the world and writing in Spanish, at the same time preparing for the day when he could publish his collected works. Even though \"The Gray Notebook\" was finally able to appear in Catalan in 1966, Pla's political troubles weren't over. After Spain's return to democracy, following the death of Franco in 1975, Pla was ostracized both by leftist intellectuals for his early association with the dictatorship and by Catalan nationalists for having written in Spanish. It would be some years before he was again heralded as Catalonia's greatest writer.

Josep Pla, an oil painter from Spain, and David Rust, a watercolourist who lives in Cornwall, share the white walls - two different creative characters deriving motivation from the sea and rivers. The jagged Cornish coastline and the ever-changing seas that surge around it have fired creativity for generations: painters such as Stanhope Forbes and Charles Napier Hemy through to Jack Pender and Margo Maeckelberghe, the Cornish Bard. Writers too have used such seascapes in their storytelling: Winston Graham, Denys Val Baker, who lived for a while at Golant and sailed, and Dame Daphne du Maurier, who also sailed, are just three of them.