Full Description
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.
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
