Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superceded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin...

Postmodernity in Spanish Fiction and Cultureremedies a critical gap that exists within Spanish literary criticism regarding the urgency to define and to identify what really constitutes postmodernity within the Spanish context. A genuine debate about this phenomenon has been lacking because of the tendency of some critics to dismiss postmodernity’s existence on the Peninsula. Most of those academic endeavours that engage postmodernity and postmodernism in Spain fail to connect these two phenomena to those exclusive social and cultural experiences that are patently Spanish. Such studies only emphasize postmodernity as social and economic conditions of a Spain of the twentieth...

Themovidais a manifestation of postmodernity in Spain in the immediate post-Franco years. It is a term associated with the upsurge of creativity that invaded the cultural scene of Spanish cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Vigo, Seville and Bilbao in the late 1970s through till the mid-1980s. Themovidarelates to Spanish youth culture construed as young people ‘ on the move’. Rather than a mere superficial glitz, the movida provides evidence of the real beginnings of a postmodern current in Spain where issues of identity, particularly sexual and gender identity, emerged to challenge the homogenizing discourses of an...

Desencantois an expression of postmodernity in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s.Desencantorefers to the general sense of disenchantment that appeared following the failures of the liberal democratic system that replaced Francoist socioeconomic policies. From a historical perspective,desencantooccupies the gap between the end of Francoist policies and the recognition of Spain as an integral part of Europe as well as a postmodern nation. Marked by a collective economic decentredness and cultural disintegration,desencantorepresents the unfulfilled promise of financial and political windfall of Spain’s integration with Europe in the 1980s. It also epitomizes the bursting of...

The present chapter is governed by the understanding thatdesencantoand a mutated form of themovidaandpasotismoare still prevalent in contemporary Spanish culture.Desencanto,as I argued in the previous chapter, circumscribed the Spanish urban landscape of the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Of principal interest here is to examine how the same phenomenon manifests itself at the edge of the millennium and at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The goal is to ascertain whether any significant shifts have occurred in the way Spaniards conceive of themselves in the late 1990s and at the beginning...

In this chapter, I will examine the science fiction short stories of Elía Barceló, Fermín Sánchez Carracedo, José Cuervo Álvarez, Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero in order to establish the nexus between science fiction and postmodernity in contemporary Spanish culture. By virtue of their inherent meta-discursive proclivities, the science fiction texts studied here could be read metaphorically as a measure of much broader socio-cultural changes that are taking place in the contemporary Spanish society. As a ‘low culture’ genre, science fiction, as Rosi Braidotti suggests, is ‘mercifully free of grandiose pretensions – of the aesthetic or cognitive kind...