Jo Labanyi and Luisa Elena Delgado provide the first cultural history of modern literatures in Spain. With contributors Helena Buffery, Kirsty Hooper, and Mari Jose Olaziregi, they showcase the country’s cultural richness and complexity by working across its four major literary cultures – Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque – from the eighteenth century to the present. Engaging critically with the concept of the “national”, Modern Literatures in Spain traces the uneven institutionalization of Spain’s diverse literatures in a context of Castilian literary hegemony, as well as examining diasporic and exile writing . The thematically organized chapters explore literary constructions of subjectivity, gender, and sexuality; urban and rural imaginaries; intersections between high and popular culture; and the formation of a public sphere. Throughout, readings are attentive to the multiple ways in which literature serves as a barometer of cultural responses to historical change. An introduction to major cultural debates as well as an original analysis of key texts, this book is essential reading for students and scholars with an interest in the literatures and cultures of Spain.

Francisco de Quevedo (Madrid, 1580-1645) was well known for his rich and dynamic style, achieved through an ingenious and complex manipulation of language. Yet he was also a consistent and systematic thinker, with moral philosophy, broadly understood, lying at the core of his numerous and varied works. Quevedo lived in an age of transition, with the Humanist tradition on the wane, and his writing expresses the characteristic uncertainty of a moment of cultural transition. In this book Alfonso Rey surveys Quevedo's ideas in such diverse fields as ethics, politics, religion and literature, ideas which hitherto have received little attention. New information is also provided towards a reconstruction of the cultural evolution of Europe in the years prior to the Enlightenment, and thus the scope of the book extends beyond that of Spanish literature.

Widely known for his novels El reino de este mundo and Los pasos perdidos, the Swiss-born Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier incorporated music in his fiction extensively, for instance in titles, in analogies with musical forms, in scenes depicting performances, recordings and broadcasts, and in characters’ discussions of musical issues. Chornik’s study focuses on Carpentier’s writings from a musicological perspective, bridging intermediality and intertextuality through an examination of music as formative, as form, and as performed. The emphasis lies on the novels Los pasos perdidos, El acoso, Concierto barroco and La consagración de la primavera, and on his unknown essay Los orígenes de la música y la música primitiva, the repository of ideas for Los pasos perdidos, included here for the first time as facsimile and in English translation. Chornik’s study will appeal to scholars and students in literary studies, cultural studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, and to a specifically interdisciplinary readership.

During the 1980s, the urban youth movement known as la movida transformed the Spanish cultural landscape, particularly in the country's capital, Madrid. After a four-decade long dictatorship, artists and thinkers sought to make the most of their newly found freedoms. The vibrancy, optimism and aesthetic heterogeneity of the period are best captured in contemporary ephemera - in the fanzines and magazines that provided movida participants with an immediate and largely unmediated outlet for their creative experiments. Among them, monthly arts magazine La Luna de Madrid is arguably the most iconic, and its preoccupation with urban space, identity, and postmodernity suggests that la movida was indeed more than 'just a teardrop in the rain', as some of its critics have suggested.

Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Páramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as scriptwriter on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo’s cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Japanese Noh or "mask" plays and modernist experimentation in the Irish language. They also deploy diverse theoretical frameworks that range from Roland Barthes’ work on studium and punctum in photography to Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on space and spatiality and the postmodern insights of Jean Baudrillard on the nature of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. In this way, innovative approaches are brought to bear on the Rulfian texts as a way of illuminating the rich tensions and anxieties they evoke about Mexico, about history, about art and about the human condition.

The present book is a complex approach to the elements that built the history of Catalonia. This collective book analyze differents aspects, such as: cultural history, the History of Law, the Political history or the History of the State, from the Midlle Ages to the Modern and Contemporary history.

Each poem in 'Edward Hopper' is based on a painting by the American artist. Together they form a narrative sketching the life of the subject from small-town origins to big-city life, from youth to age.