Using mnemonics is an age-old technique for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. In Spanish Memory Book, William Harrison and Dorothy Welker offer original mnemonic rimes that are by turns amusing, ironic, pathetic, sentimental, and sardonic to help students and independent learners acquire and remember Spanish vocabulary. Included are mnemonic jingles for 700 of the 2,000 most commonly used Spanish words. Each jingle contains both the sound of the Spanish word and its English meaning. The authors have included a general pronunciation guide to Spanish vowels and consonants. This innovative approach, which the authors have used successfully with their own students, is simple, effective, and entertaining. In the words of one student, "This book teaches me not only Spanish words but English words as well."

Using a rich variety of sources, this book explores how the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War influenced the transition to democracy in Spain after Franco's death in 1975.

Focusing on seven literary texts produced in the post-millennial period, this monograph examines the relationship between space and Republican memory and the reconfigurations of power in the Civil War, Franco Dictatorship, Transition and the resurgence period. Ryan combines scholarship on the history of spatiality in Spain with sociological literature on memory and identity, demonstrating the intertwinement of historical change and spatial transformation with the individual Republican struggle to maintain continuity with a marginalized identity.

The 2015 law granting Spanish nationality to the descendants of Jews expelled in 1492 is the latest example of a widespread phenomenon in contemporary Spain, the "re-discovery" of its Jewish heritage. In The Memory Work of Jewish Spain, Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa examine the implications of reclaiming this memory through the analysis of a comprehensive range of emerging cultural practices, political initiatives and institutions in the context of the long history of Spain's ambivalence towards its Jewish past. Through oral interviews, analyses of museums, newly reconfigured "Jewish quarters," excavated Jewish sites, popular festivals, tourist brochures, literature and art, The Memory Work of Jewish Spain explores what happens when these initiatives are implemented at the local level in cities and towns throughout Spain, and how they affect Spain's present.

This collection explores the role of memoria histórica in its broadest sense, bringing together studies of narrative, theatre, visual expressions, film, television, and radio that provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary cultural production in Spain in this regard. Employing a wide range of critical approaches to works that examine, comment on, and recreate events and epochs from the civil war to the present, the essays gathered here bring together research and intercultural memory to investigate half a century of cultural production, ranging from “high culture” to more popular productions, such as television series and graphic novels. A testament to the conflation of multiple silencings – be they of the defeated, victims of trauma or women – this project is about hearing the voices of the unheard and recovering their muted past.

An open-minded and clear-eyed reexamination of the cultural artifacts of Franco's Spain True, false, or both? Spain's 1939-75 dictator, Francisco Franco, was a pioneer of water conservation and sustainable energy. Pedro Almodóvar is only the most recent in a line of great antiestablishment film directors who have worked continuously in Spain since the 1930s. As early as 1943, former Republicans and Nationalists were collaborating in Spain to promote the visual arts, irrespective of the artists' political views. Censorship can benefit literature. Memory is not the same thing as history. Inside Spain as well as outside, many believe-wrongly-that under Franco's fascist dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. In his groundbreaking new book, Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936, Jeremy Treglown argues that oversimplifications like these of a complicated, ambiguous actuality have contributed to a separate falsehood: that there was and continues to be a national pact to forget the evils for which Franco's side (and, according to this version, his side alone) was responsible. The myth that truthfulness was impossible inside Franco's Spain may explain why foreign narratives (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia) have seemed more credible than Spanish ones. Yet La Guerra de España was, as its Spanish name asserts, Spain's own war, and in recent years the country has begun to make a more public attempt to "reclaim" its modern history of fascism. How it is doing so, and the role played in the process by notions of historical memory, are among the subjects of this wide-ranging and challenging book. Franco's Crypt reveals that despite state censorship, events of the time were vividly recorded. Treglown looks at what's actually there-monuments, paintings, public works, novels, movies, video games-and considers, in a captivating narrative, the totality of what it shows. The result is a much-needed reexamination of a history we only thought we knew.

Mnemonics is an age-old device for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. As in the authors' previous Memory Books, the Intermediate Spanish Memory Book makes use of this reliable memory help in a series of mnemonic jingles that are by turns playful, sardonic, touching, and heroic to help both students and independent learners acquire and remember Spanish vocabulary. The 500-plus words in this book represent a more advanced vocabulary than those in the Spanish Memory Book (1990) and the Spanish Memory Book, Junior Edition (1993). The mnemonic jingles present both the sound of the Spanish word (indicated by syllables in italic type) and its English meaning (given by a word or phrase in boldface type): merienda: picnic, afternoon tea Mary, end a boring picnic. Just say, "I'm going home. I'm sick, Nick." This innovative approach to vocabulary building is simple, effective, and entertaining.

Most accounts of the Spanish transition to democracy have been celebratory exercises at the service of a stabilizing rather than a critical project of far-reaching reform. As one of the essays in this volume puts it, the “pact of oblivion,” which characterized the Spanish transition to democracy, curtailed any serious attempt to address the legacies of authoritarianism that the new democracy inherited from the Franco era. As a result, those legacies pervaded public discourse even in newly created organs of opinion. As another contributor argues, the Transition was based on the erasure of memory and the invention of a new political tradition. On the other hand, memory and its etiolation have been an object of reflection for a number of film directors and fiction writers, who have probed the return of the repressed under spectral conditions. Above all, this book strives to present memory as a performative exercise of democratic agents and an open field for encounters with different, possibly divergent, and necessarily fragmented recollections. The pact of the Transition could not entirely disguise the naturalization of a society made of winners and losers, nor could it ensure the consolidation of amnesia by political agents and by the tools that create hegemony by shaping opinion. Spanish society is haunted by the specters of a past it has tried to surmount by denying it. It seems unlikely that it can rid itself of its ghosts without in the process undermining the democracy it sought to legitimate through the erasure of memories and the drowning of witnesses' voices in the cacaphony of triumphant modernization.

This book examines the contested representations of those murdered during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s in two small rural communities as they undergo the experience of exhumation, identification, and reburial from nearby mass graves. Based on interviews with relatives of the dead, community members and forensic archaeologists, it pays close attention to the role of excavated objects and images in breaking the pact of silence that surrounded the memory of these painful events for decades afterward. It also assesses the significance of archaeological and forensic practices in changing relationships between the living and dead. The exposure of graves has opened up a discursive space in Spanish society for multiple representations to be made of the war dead and of Spain’s traumatic past.

The end of the second millennium witnessed an increase in science-fictional apocalyptic narratives globally. There is a noteworthy difference between such fictions from Latin America and the anglophone world and those from Spain, in which scientific explanations of events coexist with biblically-inspired plots, characters and imagery. This is the first book-length study of either science-fictional novels or apocalyptic literature in that country, analysing six such works between 1990 and 2005. Within a theoretical framework that includes critical and genre theories, archetypal criticism, and biblical scholarship, the book explains this phenomenon as a result of three historical factors: the ‘Two Spains’, Spanish ‘difference’, and the ‘Pact of Silence’, a tacit agreement that made justice and accountability impossible in the name of a peaceful transition to democracy. It repressed any processing of the historical trauma experienced during the Civil War and dictatorship, trauma that manifests itself symbolically in these fictions.