Urban Space, Identity and Postmodernity in 1980s Spain
Rethinking the Movida

Maite Usoz de la Fuente

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Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 11

Legenda

11 October 2015  •  176pp

ISBN: 978-1-909662-44-5 (hardback)  •  RRP £80, $110, €95

ContemporarySpanishArtFiction

During the 1980s, the urban youth movement known as la movida transformed the Spanish cultural landscape, particularly in the country’s capital, Madrid. After a four-decade long dictatorship, artists and thinkers sought to make the most of their newly found freedoms. The vibrancy, optimism and aesthetic heterogeneity of the period are best captured in contemporary ephemera – in the fanzines and magazines that provided movida participants with an immediate and largely unmediated outlet for their creative experiments. Among them, monthly arts magazine La Luna de Madrid is arguably the most iconic, and its preoccupation with urban space, identity, and postmodernity suggests that la movida was indeed more than ‘just a teardrop in the rain’, as some of its critics have suggested.

Maite Usoz de la Fuente is a scholar specialising in cultural production in Spain during the post-Franco period.

Reviews:

  • ‘This is a great book for revisiting the years of cultural explosion in a Madrid—and a Spain—which had just emerged from nearly forty years of dictatorship. Madrid had always seemed to lag behind Barcelona as a culturally avant-garde city. La movida madrileña changed the way people looked at the capital, which had previously been seen as the home of conservatism and the political elite. Young people who had been born during the dictatorship and had never experienced real freedom in their lives embraced this new freedom... The book is well written, readable and accessible. The detailed analysis of La Luna de Madrid will prove to be a valuable resource for researchers studying the cultural output of la movida as well as others interested in the period of the Spanish Transition.’ — María José Blanco, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 95.4, May 2018, 370-71
  • ‘A substantial reflection on an epoch that continues to deserve critical attention from both scholars and members of the public.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 54.4, October 2018, 506-07 (full text online)

Bibliography entry:

Fuente, Maite Usoz de la, Urban Space, Identity and Postmodernity in 1980s Spain: Rethinking the Movida, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, 11 (Legenda, 2015)

First footnote reference: 35 Maite Usoz de la Fuente, Urban Space, Identity and Postmodernity in 1980s Spain: Rethinking the Movida, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, 11 (Legenda, 2015), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Fuente, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Fuente, Maite Usoz de la. 2015. Urban Space, Identity and Postmodernity in 1980s Spain: Rethinking the Movida, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, 11 (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Fuente 2015: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Fuente 2015: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

This Legenda title was first published by Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing but rights to it are now held by Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge.

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