In the last quarter of the twentieth century a considerable number of Spanish films were involved in the task of essaying the nation, that is, of attempting to make it or make it over, of trying to reshape a national identity inexorably dictated by General Francisco Franco up to his death. The book explores four major issues in this regard: 1) the filmic negotiations of the borders of the nation, focusing particularly on the debated and controversial development of Basque cinema vis- -vis the films produced in the rest of Spain; 2) the persistence of the old obsession with violence, thought of as an inescapable native trait, in a large amount of post-dictatorial films; 3) the newfound insatiable appetite for cinematic travelling, for going out and coming in through all possible variations of the road and travel movie genres; 4) and the vindication of the mother qua a benign emblem of the land and its people, of the nation. There is a narrative in Spanish cinema, taken as a collective discourse, which ties together these four cinematic topoi and proposes a nation whose specificity must be precisely its impurity-difference within as essence-a hybrid nation located in temporal and spatial rendezvous of past and present, tradition and novelty, centre and margin, inside and outside, on and beyond.

The first study of contemporary quality TV drama in two countries – Spain and Mexico -- where television has displaced cinema as the creative medium that shapes the national narrative

The earliest traceable accounts of the AIDS outbreak in Spain began to emerge during its political transition to democracy, with small clusters of cases appearing as early as 1981. HIV/AIDS would go on to shape Spain throughout its pivotal period as a fledgling democracy, underpinning the cultural explosions of the Movida, a sharp rise in intravenous drug use, and the struggles of a coalescing LGBT+ community. Feeling Sick: The Early Years of HIV/AIDS in Spain examines the cultural history of these early years of HIV/AIDS in Spain as it has been told through television and print media, ephemeral products of visual culture, fiction film, and the so-called risk groups that lived through the epidemic. The book draws on the work of Raymond Williams to characterize this emergent period within a structure of “feeling sick” and thus defined by discordant voices, disagreement, and meaning-making in a period of history in formation. Through close readings of Spanish visual culture and media alongside analysis of historical and medical documents, it asserts that a structure of feeling sick begins to coalesce around the emergence of HIV/AIDS and traces out a distinctive sense of living through history as it unfolds. By critically evaluating a selection of cultural materials, this book claims that the earliest years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Spain reveal common fears about global connectivity, the proliferation of vulnerable ties to others, and the potential of cultural and physical contaminations. Ultimately, Feeling Sick challenges the dominant narratives in which life and disease are seen as separate and unequal, and in which illness is only destructive and devastating. An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM.

Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque from its origins in tales of lowborn adventurers to its importance for the modern novel, along with consideration of the debates that the picaresque has inspired.

A book that offers new directions in the study of memory in Spain, written by one of the world's leading scholars of contemporary Spanish culture.