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Barcelona, City of Margins studies the creation of a space of dissent in the 1950s and 1960s that became the pillar of the protest movements during the final years of the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy. This space of dissent took shape in the margins of what is considered the official space of the city of Barcelona, revealing the interconnection of urbanism, literature, and photography in the formation of the political, social, and cultural movements to come in the 1970s. Olga Sendra Ferrer draws from theoretical readings on built environments, neighbourhoods, housing projects and developments, and everyday life within Spanish urban spaces. Literature and photography demonstrate the political value of cultural production and forms of cultural representation that occur from peripheral zones – those pushed aside by exclusionary politics, fascist forms of control, surveillance, and homogenization. In search of the origins of the protest movements and counter culture that would come in the final years of the Franco regime, Barcelona, City of Margins asserts the value of urban movement and cultural practice as a challenge to the spatial and urbanistic regime of Francoism.

Explora el papel fundamental de la calle en la configuración de una serie de subjetividades marginales que cobran recurrente expresión literaria en la España del siglo XIX. Si, siguiendo las famosas exclamaciones líricas machadianas, el camino se hace al andar, un acercamiento a la calle como espacio de ficciones nos emplaza a seguir la trayectoria ambulante de una serie de sujetos andantes que piden ser leídos en el contexto cultural determinante en el que afloran: en la misma calle. Figuras como la prostituta, el mendigo, el cesante, la consumista compulsiva, el ocioso, el trapero, el inmigrante, el adúltero, la mujer insatisfecha o el delincuente, entre otros, se abren camino en el espacio textual para, a través de sus caminares físicos, establecerse como seres pensantes y modernos y afirmar su subjetividad desde los márgenes de la sociedad.

Domus estudia la representación de la casa nobiliaria urbana en la narrativa corta y el teatro del siglo XVII en España. Analiza aspectos materiales y simbólicos del terreno premoderno de lo habitable como arquitectura y decoración del hogar, la división del género, la economía doméstica y la idea de lo privado y lo público. Domus< studies the representation of the urban noble house in 17th-century Spanish short novels and plays. Ityses material and symbolic aspects of early moderDomus aborda ejemplos de la dramaturgia y la narrativa corta del siglo XVII español en tanto formas estéticas que respondieron al desarrollo del mundo doméstico nobiliario y urbano de la Península Ibérica. Propone un recorrido por el terreno de lo habitable, incluyendo la arquitectura y decoración interior de la casa, las dinámicas de género, la economía doméstica y la utilización de los objetos, la luz y el espacio, deteniéndose en aspectcos que transformaron el hogar de la temprana modernidad así como también la imaginación creativa de los autores barrocos. Este estudio señala que la comedia urbana, el teatro breve y la novela cortesana ilustran tanto la importancia de temas domésticos en la ficción, como la percepción barroca de que la casa fue un escenario único para teatralizar la domesticidad. Domus delves into examples of the drama and short fiction of seventeenth-century Spanish as aesthetic forms that responded to the development of the nobility and urban domestic world of the Iberian Peninsula. The book offers a journey through the realm of the habitable, including architecture and the interior decoration of the house; gender dynamics; domestic economy and the use of objects; and light and space, stopping along the way to consider the historical aspects that transformed the early modern home as well as the creative imagination of the authors of the Baroque. This study shows that urban comedy, theater and the courtly novel illustrate both the importance of domestic issues in fiction and the Baroque perception that the house was a unique stage for dramatizing domesticity. Noelia S. Cirnigliaro es Profesora Asociada en el Departamento de español y portugués en Dartmouth College.. Noelia S. Cirnigliaro is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College.

This collection of essays explores cultural phenomena that are shaping global identities in contemporary Spain. This volume is comprised of twenty essays that examine literary, documentary, and film representations of the multicultural configurations of Spain. All of the essays treat multiculturalism in Spain, focusing on reconfigured Spanish cities and neighborhoods through Latin American, African, and/or Eastern European migrations and cultures. Principal themes of the volume include urban space and access to resources, responses to the economic crisis, emerging family portraits, public versus private spaces, the local and the global, marginalities, migrations, and public expression of human and civil rights. This project examines the intercultural exchange that takes place in recent productions against an imaginary homogeneous Spanish national identity. These films, documentaries, and narratives seek to unsettle the Spanish preconceptions of the “Other(s).” Therefore, these texts construct a hybrid concept of the nation in which perceived national identities can be altered by interactions with other cultures from a broader world.The originality of the work lies in its focus on contemporary Spanish literature, documentaries, and fictional film to foment exploration of how Spanish cities, big and small, are experiencing transformation in architecture, popular customs and festivals, economics, family dynamics, and social and political agency through the arrival of new residents from across the globe. Some of the essays question the very legitimacy of the term ‘multiculturalism,'others examine the formation of new communities, and still others explore the changes in religious representations and the environmental effects of the tourist industry. Together, the essays offer a compelling portrait of the changing face of contemporary Spain.

Through the study of more than twenty novels produced in Spain from the 1840s to the 1920s, this book explores the literary means by which the social options available to modern Spanish bourgeois citizens were discursively constructed, occasionally before and often concomitantly to their production in reality. As a result, this study is concerned with the interplay of realism and reality in modern Spain. From the earliest folletines of the 1840s to the Modernist novels of the 1920s, the majority of novels written in this eighty-year period are what one might term novelas de costumbres contemporáneas, or novels of contemporary customs, and therefore primarily concerned with faithfully copying and moreover influencing real social norms in the public sphere.In these pages, I argue that the spatial and behavioral discourses in the novels of contemporary customs offer a telling history of the evolving formulation of the Spanish bourgeoisie. The linking of novels and urbanism is hardly arbitrary in the context of nineteenth-century Spain. Urbanism, particularly in the nineteenth century, was as much a verbal construction as the novel, as proven by the lengthy treatises of such prominent Spanish bureaucrats, engineers, architects, and urban planners as Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Ildefons Cerdà and Carlos María de Castro. For Spanish intellectuals of this era, city planning and the novel functioned as parallel, enmeshed discourses in which to work out what it meant to be middle class and the roles this class ought to play in contemporary society. In this way, they can be considered associated fields of discourse, in the sense described by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault's treatise was a call for scholars to reexamine historical fields and question the historical grouping of knowledge(s) into certain discursive unities, and consider whether these might be broken up and new ones conceived.In this vein, this book undertakes a broader and more integrative view of the Spanish nineteenth century, calling into question the boundaries of fields such as etiquette and urban planning, or literature and touristic discourse.

Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience is the first book to thoroughly apply the French urban philosopher's thought on cities to the culture and literature of Spain. Fraser shows how Lefebvre's complex view of city as a mobile phenomenon is relevant to understanding a variety of Spanish cultural products—from urban plans and short writing on the urban expereince during the nineteenth century to urban theories, cultural practices and literary fiction of the twentieth century, pushing on to interrogate even te apperance of Mediterranean space and Barcelona in recent videogames.

Urban Honor in Spain is an historical study of Spain and the writing technique of laus urbis (praise of the city) during the 15th century. The book begins by providing an overview of laus urbis was developed and codified in oratory and classical literary texts during the Greco-Roman period. The book then explores how this powerful technique re-emerged during the Middle Ages to become a powerful corpus that formed an early national culture by praising cities and nations. In Medieval and Renaissance Spain, laus urbis, provided a sense of local community to city and town dwellers in the indefinite and blurry political frontier of Iberia during the Reconquista. Notwithstanding its historical significance, the book contributes to Spanish literary studies a profound and original examination of the theoretical and cultural reasons behind the concept of praising the city.