Handbook of Spanish Popular Culture

By Edward F. Stanton

Spanish popular culture is one of the richest in the world. The absence of an efficient ruling class has allowed the people to stamp their personality on all major aspects of the country's life. This book describes the peculiar Spanish feeling for death and tragedy in popular religious practices, music and the bullfight; the fiesta sense of life, so foreign to the work ethic of other Western countries; the oral tradition that has managed to survive into the post-industrial age with its creative use of slang, proverbs and obscenity; popular literature, the press, radio, television and the movies.

Students and scholars will appreciate the first comprehensive treatment of Spanish popular culture in a single volume. The author has done first-hand research in all the major regions of Spain and has compiled a list of major archives and resource centers. An extensive bibliography on the major fields of popular Spanish culture is included at the end of each chapter.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0313298858
• ISBN13: 9780313298851
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Greenwood
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Well-written, Succinct, Informative

For some reason that is interesting to contemplate but difficult to quantify, some cultures seem to attract more attention from foreigners, or a certain type of foreigner, than others do. Russian culture is one such; so is Japanese, and so is Spanish. Perhaps it is the sense of irony and tragedy that seems to permeate the history of these cultures.At any rate, there is no shortage of books on Spanish culture; indeed, one can almost speak of the field as a literary subgenre. The French and the English have probably produced more books on the subject than others have, but the subject has attracted its share of Americans too, from Washington Irving to James Michener.So one might legitimately question the need for another book on Spanish culture. In this case, there definitely is. With the exception of Russia, there is probably no nation in Europe that has undergone more change in the last century than Spain, and not just due to the Civil War. Not very many people are aware of how much Spanish society has changed since Franco died twenty-eight years ago, reinventing itself from a medieval enigma to a valid member of the European community.This book deals with Spanish popular culture by topic, reviewing in turn religion, music, sports, popular literature and several other topics. While it reviews the history of these fields summarily, the book's major purpose is to document and shed light on how Spanish popular culture has evolved in the last three decades. While Professor Stanton makes use of statistics, this book is not an essay in sociological analysis; the book is eminently readable and enlightening, despite its relatively short (238 pages) length.If it's such a good book, why only four stars? Simple: the price. At this price the publisher is virtually ensuring that the only buyers for this book will be institutional libraries. This is a real shame, since this is not some scholarly effort that would appeal to an extremely limited audience, but rather a book that should be required reading for anybody interested in Spanish culture. I can only hope that a less expensive version will eventually appear.