Overview

Over the last twenty years there has been a growing international interest in the city of Barcelona. This has been reflected in the academic world through a series of studies, courses, seminars, and publications. The Barcelona Reader hinges together a selection of the best academic articles, written in English, about the city, and its main elements of identity and interest: art, urban planning, history and social movements. The book includes scholarly essays about Barcelona that can be of interest to the student and the general public alike. It focuses on cultural representations of the city: the arts (including literature) provide a complex yet discontinuous portrait of the city, similar to a patchwork. The authors selected create a kaleidoscope of views and voices thus presenting a diverse yet inclusive Barcelona portrait. The Barcelona Reader offers a multifaceted assessment that will be essential reading for anyone interested in this iconic city.

Full Product Details

Author:   Enric Bou (Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia (Italy)) ,  Jaume Subirana
Publisher:   Liverpool University Press
Imprint:   Liverpool University Press
ISBN:  

9781786940322

ISBN 10:   1786940329
Pages:   464
Publication Date:   24 July 2017
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Introduction: Barcelona: Cultural readings of a city — Enric Bou and Jaume Subirana I City, history, and territory 1. Barcelona: The siege city — Robert Davidson 2. Barcelona as an adaptive ecology — Ferran Sagarra 3. A present past, Barcelona street names, from Víctor Balaguer to Pasqual Maragall — Jaume Subirana 4. ‘The asylum of modern times’: Barcelona and Europe — Felipe Fernández-Armesto 5. A fragile country — Colm Tóibín II City and society 6. Barcelona and modernity — Brad Epps 7. Football and identities in Catalonia — Alejandro Quiroga 8. The family and the city: Power and the creation of cultural imagery — Gary Wray McDonogh 9. Memory and the city in Barcelona’s cemeteries — Elisa Martí-López III Art, architecture, and the city 10. Picasso among his fellows at 4 Gats: Beyond Modernisme? — Jordi Falgàs 11. Gaudí: Poet of stone, artistic hedgehog — Marià Marín i Torné 12. El Poble Espanyol / El Pueblo Español (1929) — Jordana Mendelson IV The Olympics and the city 13. Barcelona: Urban identity 1992–2002 — Donald McNeill 14. From the Olympic torch to the Universal Forum of Cultures: The after-image of Barcelona’s modernity — Joan Ramon Resina V Literature, cinema, and the city 15. La Gran Encisera: Three odes to Barcelona, and a film — Josep Miquel Sobrer 16. The deceptive dame: Criminal revelations of the Catalan capital — Stewart King 17. A Biutiful city: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s filmic critique of the ‘Barcelona Model’ — Benjamin Fraser

Reviews

Bou and Subirana offer us a great collection of articles on the city of Barcelona written in English (...) in a book with a wide approach to the subject. The city is, by definition, a complex creation and its interpretation therefore demands a plurality of views ( ways of seeing according to John Berger). Barcelones, in the words of Manuel Vazquez Montalban, expresses this multifocal attitude to observe reality and face the object of study. (...) With the help of twenty-one top-level essayists, they have turned Barcelona into a field of study of increasing interest. The complexity of the city demanded, as we say, multiple knowledge. The look that the texts present to us is the result of an interpretative framework that the authors define in so far as they practice it. Toni Molla, L'Espill

Author Information

Enric Bou has been chair of the Hispanic Studies Department at Brown University (Providence), between 2002 and 2011, and president of the North- American Catalan Society between 2007 and 2010. Currently he is professor in the Department of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural Studies at Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice. His latest book is Invention of Space. City, Travel and Literature (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2013), published also in Catalan: La invenció de l’espai. Ciutat i viatge (Publicacions Universitat de València, 2013). Jaume Subirana is Associate Professor at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and he has been visiting professor at Duke University, University of British Columbia, Brown University and Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice. He edited Willkommen in Katalonien. Eine literarische Entdeckungsreise (dtv, 2007), and has published Barcelona acròstic, Barcelona 365. Temps i ciutat and recently, BarcelonABC. Alfabet d’una ciutat/A City Alphabet (2013).

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