Kirjahaku

This glossary offers an exciting introduction to the diversity and richness of Spanish culture and society and a route-map to further study. Designed specifically with undergraduates in mind, it contains around 450 concise alphabetically arranged and accessible explanations of the key words, events, figures and concepts in Spain since 1939.

Since the release of his first feature in 1996, Alejandro Amenábar has become the ‘golden boy’ of Spanish filmmaking, a bankable star director whose brand virtually guarantees quality, big audiences and domestic box office success. He has directed three of the highest-grossing movies in Spanish film history and has enjoyed enormous international and critical acclaim, including an Oscar for Best Foreign Film for Mar Adentro/The Sea Inside, 2004. This book is the first full-length study in English of Amenábar’s shorts and feature films. It provides detailed analysis of his engagement with popular film genres as the basis for an auteur cinema and incorporates a reappraisal of his auteurism as fundamentally decentred and shared. An essential resource for students, scholars and fans of Amenábar, the book will also appeal to a wider readership, including professionals in the film, media and culture industries as well as those who have a general interest in the best of Spanish, European and world cinema.

Between 1940 and 1965, Spain was almost entirely cut off from the intellectual life of western Europe. Within Spain itself, opposition writers believed that a committed literature could take over the role of the press in a democratic society, dealing with daily realities and social issues as well as with political questions. This was the background to the emergence in the 1950s of the novela social, Spain’s post-war realist novel.First published in 1990, Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain explores the early development of this literary movement and reveals the beginnings of the novela social as a complex, dynamic, gradually unfolding process. Making use of new research, the author charts the ways in which authors involved in the novela social formed groups around certain literary and cultural reviews of the period. He traces the influences which provided the early social novelists with theoretical and practical guidance for their writing, pointing especially to Sartre, Italian neo-realism, and the novels of North American writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos.A major reassessment of an important literary movement, Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain is deeply concerned with relations between texts, contexts, and wider social and cultural processes. It will be of special value to students of contemporary Spanish literature and history.

Since the release of his first feature in 1996, Alejandro Amenábar has become the ‘golden boy’ of Spanish filmmaking, a bankable star director whose brand virtually guarantees quality, big audiences and domestic box office success. He has directed three of the highest-grossing movies in Spanish film history and has enjoyed enormous international and critical acclaim, including an Oscar for Best Foreign Film for Mar Adentro/The Sea Inside, 2004. This book is the first full-length study in English of Amenábar’s shorts and feature films. It provides detailed analysis of his engagement with popular film genres as the basis for an auteur cinema and incorporates a reappraisal of his auteurism as fundamentally decentred and shared. An essential resource for students, scholars and fans of Amenábar, the book will also appeal to a wider readership, including professionals in the film, media and culture industries as well as those who have a general interest in the best of Spanish, European and world cinema.