This work adopts an interdisciplinary approach in its study of 20th-century Spanish culture and society, emphasizing contemporary developments. The contributors take into account major recent changes which have taken place in the context of higher education Spanish studies.

Disability Studies and Spanish Culture is the first book to explore representations of intellectual disabilities (Down syndrome, autism, alexia/agnosia) in contemporary Spanish films, novels, a graphic novel/comic and public expositions by disabled artists.

This publication "makes available two decades of work by the pioneering scholar of Spanish cultural studies, Jo Labanyi, covering literature, cinema, painting, photography, and memory studies, with a frequent focus on gender. The essays explore the ways in which cultural texts serve as a vehicle for negotiating cultural anxieties, through their encoding of emotional structures that reveal social tensions and contradictions. The discussion of a wide range of Spanish texts, from the early nineteenth-century to the present, traces stages in the history of the emotions and their imbrication in political processes. The essays have in common an attempt to read against the grain; in many cases, the focus on gender is what makes that possible."--Publisher's website.

Gema Pérez-Sánchez argues that the process of political and cultural transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain can be read allegorically as a shift from a dictatorship that followed a self-loathing "homosexual" model to a democracy that identified as a pluralized "queer" body. Focusing on the urban cultural phenomenon of la movida, she offers a sustained analysis of high queer culture, as represented by novels, along with an examination of low queer culture, as represented by comic books and films. Pérez-Sánchez shows that urban queer culture played a defining role in the cultural and political processes that helped to move Spain from a premodern, fascist military dictatorship to a late-capitalist, parliamentary democracy. The book highlights the contributions of women writers Ana María Moix and Cristina Peri Rossi, as well as comic book artists Ana Juan, Victoria Martos, Ana Miralles, and Asun Balzola. Its attention to women's cultural production functions as a counterpoint to its analysis of the works of such male writers as Juan Goytisolo and Eduardo Mendicutti, comic book artists Nazario, Rubén, and Luis Pérez Ortiz, and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar.

Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies is a collection of new essays by recognised experts from around the world on various aspects of the new discipline of Latin American cultural studies. Essays are grouped in five distinct but interconnected sections focusing respectively on: (I) the theory of Latin American cultural studies; (II) the icons of culture; (III) culture as a commodity; (IV) culture as a site of resistance; and (V) everyday cultural practices. The essays range across a wide gamut of theories about Latin American culture; some, for example, analyse the role that ideas about the nation - and national icons  have played in the formation of a sense of identity in Latin America, while others focus on the resonance underlying cultural practices as diverse as football in Argentina, TV in Uruguay, cinema in Brazil, and the 'bolero' and soaps of modern-day Mexico. Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies has an introduction setting the ideas explored in each section in their proper context. The essays are written in jargon-free English (all Spanish terms have been translated into English), and are supplemented by a concluding section with suggestions for further reading.

This book offers a comprehensive account of modern Spanish culture, tracing its dramatic and often unexpected development from its beginnings after the Revolution of 1868 to the present day. Specially-commissioned essays by leading experts provide analyses of the historical and political background of modern Spain, the culture of the major autonomous regions (notably Castile, Catalonia, and the Basque Country), and the country's literature: narrative, poetry, theatre and the essay. Spain's recent development is divided into three main phases: from 1868 to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; the period of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco; and the post-Franco arrival of democracy. The concept of 'Spanish culture' is investigated, and there are studies of Spanish painting and sculpture, architecture, cinema, dance, music, and the modern media. A chronology and guides to further reading are provided, making the volume an invaluable introduction to the politics, literature and culture of modern Spain.

*Includes rare color images. This book demonstrates the evolution of Spain's conceptualisation of its enemies, from biblical and Roman times to the early modern period, and it also illustrates how this transformative discourse became exercised upon Spain by its own enemies in Europe. Each chapter contributes to the study of multiplicity as both a problem to be studied as well as a scholarly methodology that anticipates the structure of the problem. This book is divided into three thematic sections, the first of which establishes the medieval roots for representing Spain's early modern enemies. The two chapters that compose this section respectively explore the naming and visualization of an enemy that was almost entirely Muslim. The second section of this book contains two chapters that explore the textual and visual references to Islam in the Americas during the conquest and early in the period of colonization. The last section of this book contrasts the quality of information conveyed by archival and mass-produced texts. The first of two chapters notes that Muslims indeed did come to the Spanish Americas in the early modern period. The archival research prepared for this chapter contrasts with the mass-produced images and texts in the last chapter, and it is argued that different qualities of information are communicated by mass-produced, and therefore shaped, discourse, rather than by uncirculated, unarticulated texts. That is, out of the archives, a different picture of Islam in the Americas emerges. The final chapter examines how Spanish-authored chronicles became transformed through translation, and with the attachment of new illustrations, into propagandistic tools designed to undermine Spanish conquest and claims on land. This book identifies and illustrates the discourse imposed upon Spain's enemies, and demonstrates how other Europeans used that same discourse to de-Occidentalize, disparage and criticize Spanish activities in the early modern period. Each chapter explores the implications of textual and visual multiplicity while questioning the impact multiplicity has had on the conceptualization of the conquest in more modern times. Scholars of history and literature will appreciate different aspects of this book's arguments. The former will encounter in-depth and copious archival sources about the conquest and its related themes, whereas the latter will enjoy the text-image and literary analysis of those aforementioned sources.

By examining the pictorial episodes in the Spanish baroque novella, this book elucidates how writers create pictorial texts, how audiences visualise their words, what consequences they exert on cognition and what actions this process inspires. To interrogate characters’ mental activity, internalisation of text and the effects on memory, this book applies methodologies from cognitive cultural studies, Classical memory treatises and techniques of spiritual visualisation. It breaks new ground by investigating how artistic genres and material culture help us grasp the audience’s aural, material, visual and textual literacies, which equipped the public with cognitive mechanisms to face restrictions in post-Counter-Reformation Spain. The writers examined include prominent representatives of Spanish prose —Cervantes, Lope de Vega, María de Zayas and Luis Vélez de Guevara— as well as Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses and an anonymous group in Córdoba.

Contemporary cultural geography and contemporary Spanish culture are married in this pioneering study of space and place. Spain's varied terrain—with complex negotiations between the rural, urban, and coastal—offers an ideal setting in which to explore questions of landscape, space, and place. In Spanish Spaces, Ann Davies draws on contemporary Spanish film and literature to explore Spain's sophisticated sense of its geographical and spatial self.

These interdisciplinary essays focus on how cultural practices help form the Spanish identity, by introducing a range of theoretical debates and exploring specific areas of 20th century Spanish culture.