The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation's past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, oftentimes opposing, ideological and aesthetic agendas. It follows the auto from the avant-garde stagings and rewritings of the form in the early twentieth century, to the Francoist productions by the Teatro Nacional de la Falange, to postmodern parodies of the form in the era following Franco's death to demonstrate how twentieth-century Spanish dramatists use the auto in their reassessment of the nation's political and artistic past, and as a way of envisioning its future.

This book explores the role played by artists and intellectuals who constructed and disseminated various competing images of national identity which polarized Spanish society prior to the Civil War. The convergence of modern and essentialist discourses and practices, especially in literature and poetry, in what is conventionally called in Spanish letters "The Generation of '27", created fissures between competing views of aesthetics and ideology that cut across political affiliation. Silvina Schammah exposes the paradoxes facing Madrid's cultural vanguards, as they were torn by their ambition for universality, cosmopolitanism and transcendence on the one hand and by the centripetal forces of nationalistic ideologies on the other. Taking upon themselves roles to become the disseminators and populizers of radical positions and world-views first elaborated and conducted by the young urban intelligentsia, their proposed aim of incorporating diverse identities embedded in different cultural constructions and discourse was to have very real and tragic consequences as political and intellectual lines polarized in the years prior to the Spanish Civil War.

Explores the role played by artists and intellectuals who constructed and disseminated various competing images of national identity which polarised Spanish society prior to the Civil War. This title exposes the paradoxes facing Madrid's cultural vanguards.

Studies that connect the Spanish 17th and 20th centuries usually do so through a conservative lens, assuming that the blunt imperialism of the early modern age, endlessly glorified by Franco's dictatorship, was a constant in the Spanish imaginary. This book, by contrast, recuperates the thriving, humanistic vision of the Golden Age celebrated by Spanish progressive thinkers, writers, and artists in the decades prior to 1939 and the Francoist Regime. The hybrid, modern stance of the country in the 1920s and early 1930s would uniquely incorporate the literary and political legacies of the Spanish Renaissance into the ambitious design of a forward, democratic future. In exploring the complex understanding of the multifaceted event that is modernity, the life story and literary opus of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) acquires a new significance, given the weight of the author in the poetic and political endeavors of those Spanish left-wing reformists who believed they could shape a new Spanish society. By recovering their progressive dream, buried for almost a century, of incipient and full Spanish modernities, Ana María G. Laguna establishes a more balanced understanding of both the modern and early modern periods and casts doubt on the idea of a persistent conservatism in Golden Age literature and studies. This book ultimately serves as a vigorous defense of the canonical as well as the neglected critical traditions that promoted Cervantes's humanism in the 20th century.

Coronada y el toro (Coronada and the Bull) is a play written in 1974 by Francisco Morales Nieva (1924–2016), a prominent figure in the history of Spanish theatre. Even though the aesthetic quality of his drama competed with that of his contemporaries, with many of whom he interacted (Ionesco, Genet, Brecht, Grotowski, et al.), Nieva’s recognition was unduly delayed within Spain and, on the international scene, his name remains eclipsed by playwrights such as Federico García Lorca and Antonio Buero Vallejo. Traditionalist and populist yet cosmopolitan and neo-avant-garde, Nieva began writing plays in the late 1940s but never got the chance to perform any on the commercial stage until 1976, a few months after the death of General Francisco Franco, whose censorship machine forced his work underground. Hard to subject to any single classification, Nieva’s theatre is as complex as it is innovative in its combination of resources from a wide range of artistic trends, from the género chico to the Baroque to postmodernism. Coronada y el toro is a sophisticated masterpiece, rich in intertextuality, humour, and suspense.

Lavapiés - diverse, multicultural, and one of Madrid’s most iconic neighbourhoods - has emerged as a locus of resistance movements and of cultural flourishing. Poised at the intersection of theatre studies and cultural geography, this innovative study sketches its physical and imaginary contours. In From the Theater to the Plaza Matthew Feinberg guides readers on a journey through the development of the theatre, as both art and space, in Lavapiés. Offering a detailed analysis of dramatic texts and productions, performance spaces, urban planning documents, and the cultural activities of squatters, Feinberg sheds new light on the lead-up to Spain’s economic crisis and the emergence in 2011 of the 15-M anti-austerity protest movement. The result is a multidisciplinary account of how the spectacle of the contemporary city connects local, municipal, and global geographies. By linking the neighbourhood’s unique role as both a site and a subject of Madrid’s theatre tradition with its contemporary struggles over gentrification, From the Theater to the Plaza offers new approaches for understanding how culture and capital produce the twenty-first-century city.

TEMPORARY Bergman looks at the representation of criminals in early modern Spanish theatre and the connection between criminality, the portrayal of criminal heroes on stage, and public displays of law enforcement within and outside the playhouse. His main purpose is to see to how Baroque spectacle (a term of art in theatre that refers to a particular event, often in expressions of popular culture) appears either to align itself, work against, or be independent of the social means of control of the day. His main argument is that that the propaganda power of early modern Spanish spectacle has been vastly overstated. Ted L. L. Bergman is a Lecturer in Spanish, University of St Andrews.