Spain Is Different

"Spain Is (Still) Different introduces readers to issues concerning the cultural function of tourism in Spain. An international team of scholars addresses both theoretical perspectives on the study of tourism in Spain and specific cases of the cultural impact of travel and tourism on Spanish culture in the late eighteenth to early twenty-first centuries.

The end of the second millennium witnessed an increase in science-fictional apocalyptic narratives globally. There is a noteworthy difference between such fictions from Latin America and the anglophone world and those from Spain, in which scientific explanations of events coexist with biblically-inspired plots, characters and imagery. This is the first book-length study of either science-fictional novels or apocalyptic literature in that country, analysing six such works between 1990 and 2005. Within a theoretical framework that includes critical and genre theories, archetypal criticism, and biblical scholarship, the book explains this phenomenon as a result of three historical factors: the ‘Two Spains’, Spanish ‘difference’, and the ‘Pact of Silence’, a tacit agreement that made justice and accountability impossible in the name of a peaceful transition to democracy. It repressed any processing of the historical trauma experienced during the Civil War and dictatorship, trauma that manifests itself symbolically in these fictions.

Investigates the Spanish people and culture, and examines how Spaniards and Americans can interact with each other successfully.

Now in an updated second edition Seven years after the publication of the first edition, Spain is still different, but it is changing, too - modernizing rapidly and participating as an active member of the European Union. While thoroughly updating her original work, Helen Wattley-Ames has maintained her focus in describing the uniqueness of both the Spanish people and their culture and on examining what effect the differences have on the way the Spaniards and Americans relate to and interact with each other. She looks at how Spain has evolved from a travel destination, as source of "sun and cheap wine," to a dynamic modern society. She depicts a people proud of their accomplishments, yet working hard to maintain valued traditions in the face of increased buying power and more European and American influence. The author begins by looking into Spain's past and at critical dimensions of present day American-Spanish relations. She then explores certain aspects of culture important in cross-cultural interactions: society and the individual; relationships; language and communication; work and play. She ends each chapter with an "encounter" - a critical incident that illuminates a situation which may cause misunderstanding, embarrassment or conflict. With extensively updated and revised sections on women (in the workplace in particular), and new sections on minorities and immigrants, and ethics and corruption, the new edition of Spain is Different will be welcomed by anyone looking for clear guidance on how to be most effective in the encounter with the people and culture of Spain.

The slogan that launched the tourist industry in the 1960s, Spain is different, has come to haunt historians. This book tackles a number of key themes in modern Spanish history: liberalism, nationalism, anticlericalism, the Second Republic, the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy.

Seven years after the publication of the first edition, Spain is still different, but it is changing, too—modernizing rapidly and participating as an active member of the European Union. While thoroughly updating her original work, Helen Wattley-Ames has maintained her focus in describing the uniqueness of both the Spanish people and their culture and on examining what effect the differences have on the way the Spaniards and Americans relate to and interact with each other. She looks at how Spain has evolved from a travel destination, as source of “sun and cheap wine,” to a dynamic modern society. She depicts a people proud of their accomplishments, yet working hard to maintain valued traditions in the face of increased buying power and more European and American influence. The author begins by looking into Spain’s past and at critical dimensions of present day American-Spanish relations. She then explores certain aspects of culture important in cross-cultural interactions: society and the individual; relationships; language and communication; work and play. She ends each chapter with an “encounter”—a critical incident that illuminates a situation which may cause misunderstanding, embarrassment or conflict. With extensively updated and revised sections on women (in the workplace in particular), and new sections on minorities and immigrants, and ethics and corruption, the new edition of Spain is Different will be welcomed by anyone looking for clear guidance on how to be most effective in the encounter with the people and culture of Spain.

Momentous changes swept Spain in the fifteenth century. A royal marriage united Castile and Aragon, its two largest kingdoms. The last Muslim emirate on the Iberian Peninsula fell to Spanish Catholic armies. And conquests in the Americas were turning Spain into a great empire. Yet few in this period of flourishing Spanish power could define “Spain” concretely, or say with any confidence who were Spaniards and who were not. Speaking of Spain offers an analysis of the cultural and political forces that transformed Spain’s diverse peoples and polities into a unified nation. Antonio Feros traces evolving ideas of Spanish nationhood and Spanishness in the discourses of educated elites, who debated whether the union of Spain’s kingdoms created a single fatherland (patria) or whether Spain remained a dynastic monarchy comprised of separate nations. If a unified Spain was emerging, was it a pluralistic nation, or did “Spain” represent the imposition of the dominant Castilian culture over the rest? The presence of large communities of individuals with Muslim and Jewish ancestors and the colonization of the New World brought issues of race to the fore as well. A nascent civic concept of Spanish identity clashed with a racialist understanding that Spaniards were necessarily of pure blood and “white,” unlike converted Jews and Muslims, Amerindians, and Africans. Gradually Spaniards settled the most intractable of these disputes. By the time the liberal Constitution of Cádiz (1812) was ratified, consensus held that almost all people born in Spain’s territories, whatever their ethnicity, were Spanish.

A sibling of interwar Europe's other fascist regimes, Franco's Spain survived them all, growing to old age in an era of liberal democracy in Western Europe. It weathered the explosive social movements and student disillusionment of the 1960s and lingered into the 1970s, its earlier fascist ideology attenuated almost out of recognition, with simple survival its greatest preoccupation. Francois Spain looks beyond the mythology surrounding the origins of the dictatorship to provide a critical overview of the regime -- from its emergence after a bloody uprising against a democratic government; through the "high period" of Francoism with its poverty, hunger and fear, followed by a complex period of change and economic growth; to the final demise of the dictatorship, amid open opposition and internal defections. Economic and social conditions are as integral a part of the story in Franco's Spain, as politics and international relations find their place alongside purely domestic issues. The book also peers beyond the grave, examining the transition to democracy after the dictator's death in 1975.

Engaging history of the rich cultural, social and political life of Spain from prehistoric times to the present.

'Jeremy Black skilfully sketches social, cultural and political trends' - Christina Hardyment, Times audiobook of the week 'A remarkable mixture of cold history, wide culture and personal experience' Ciro Paoletti, Secretary General of the Italian Commission of Military History Despite the Roman Empire's famous 500-year reign over Europe, parts of Africa and the Middle East, Italy does not have the same long national history as states such as France or England. Divided for much of its history, Italy's regions have been, at various times, parts of bigger, often antagonistic empires, notably those of Spain and Austria. In addition, its challenging and varied terrain made consolidation of political control all the more difficult. This concise history covers, in very readable fashion, the formative events in Italy's past from the rise of Rome, through a unified country in thrall to fascism in the first half of the twentieth century right up to today. The birthplace of the Renaissance and the place where the Baroque was born, Italy has always been a hotbed of culture. Within modern Italy country there is fierce regional pride in the cultures and identities that mark out Tuscany, Rome, Sicily and Venice to name just a few of Italy's many famous regions. Jeremy Black draws on the diaries, memoirs and letters of historic travellers to Italy to gain insight into the passions of its people, first chronologically then regionally. In telling Italy's story, Black examines what it is that has given Italians such cultural clout - from food and drink, music and fashion, to art and architecture - and explores the causes and effects of political events, and the divisions that still exist today.