Creating Spaniards


Book Description

Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic explores the origins and lasting influences of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, nature, national. In the first sense, the land is a physical and bounded body of terrain upon which the nation state is constructed (e.g., the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea). In the second, the country is constituted through its people and established through time and precedence (e.g., land where our fathers died, land of the Pilgrims pride). Kenneth Robert Olwig s extended exploration of these discourses is a masterful work of scholarship both broad and deep, which opens up new avenues of thinking in the areas of geography, literature, theater, history, political science, law, and environmental studies. Olwig tracks these ideas though Anglo-American history, starting with seventeenth-century conflicts between the Stuart kings and the English Parliament, and the Stuart dream of uniting Scotland with England and Wales into one nation on the island of Britain. He uses a royal production of a Ben Jonson masque, with stage sets by architect Inigo Jones, as a touchstone for exploring how the notion of "landscape" expands from artful stage scenery to a geopolitical ideal. Olwig pursues these contested concepts of the body politic from Europe to America and to global politics, illuminating a host of topics, from national parks and environmental planning to theories of polity and virulent nationalistic movements. "




The Krausist Movement and Ideological Change in Spain, 1854-1874


Book Description

This is a definitive study of a major intellectual movement of nineteenth-century Spain - the 'harmonic rationalism' of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832). Professor López-Morillas clearly outlines the Krausist philosophy (dedicated to an ideal of universal brotherhood) and its relevance to Spain, where it had an unexpectedly powerful influence.




The Revolting Masses


Book Description

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist best known for The Revolt of the Masses, first translated into English in 1932. In it, Ortega critiques a populist deformation of democracy by the rise of a “mass mentality” characterized by selfishness, a lack of curiosity, and a general indifference to the opinions and attitudes of others. However, as Brendon Westler makes clear, we need to look beyond Ortega’s arguments about populism and democracy in his most famous work to recover the philosopher’s expansive political outlook and to identify his valuable contributions to the history and advancement of liberalism. Westler’s book reconstructs Ortega’s political theory, underscoring its distinctive historical origins as well as the ways in which it might be instructive to us today. Through an exploration of works less familiar to an English-speaking audience, such as Concord and Liberty, “Vieja y nueva política,” “De Europa meditatio Quaedam,” and “Democracia morbosa,” combined with a sensitivity to larger social and political ideas circulating within Spain, The Revolting Masses traces the contours of Ortega’s approach to politics. Westler argues that reading texts written over the course of the philosopher’s entire career, in combination with The Revolt of the Masses, offers a more complete picture of Ortega’s political thought—one that advocates for a liberal ethos as an answer to populism and promotes both individual freedom and the preservation of community bonds. As The Revolting Masses shows, Ortega was, above all, a philosopher who reflected on what it would take for people of differing beliefs to live together. His unique conception of liberalism, grounded in the Spanish tradition, not only emphasizes pluralism and diversity of thought and institutions but also serves as a potential antidote to the populism of our present moment.




Constructing Spanish Womanhood


Book Description

The first anthology in English on modern Spanish women's history and identity formation.







The Educated Woman


Book Description

The Educated Woman is a comparative study of the ideas on female nature that informed debates on women’s higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in three western European countries. Exploring the multi-layered roles of science and medicine in constructions of sexual difference in these debates, the book also pays attention to the variety of ways in which contemporary feminists negotiated and reconstituted conceptions of the female mind and its relationship to the body. While recognising similarities, Rowold shows how in each country the higher education debates and the underlying conceptions of women’s nature were shaped by distinct historical contexts.




Imagining 'America' in late Nineteenth Century Spain


Book Description

This book examines the processes of production, circulation and reception of images of America in late nineteenth century Spain. When late nineteenth century Spaniards looked at the United States, they, like Tocqueville, ‘saw more than America’. What did they see? Between the ‘glorious’ liberal revolution of 1868 and the run-up to the 1898 war with the US that would end Spain’s New World empire, Spanish liberal and democratic reformers imagined the USA as a place where they could preview the ‘modern way of life’, as a political and social model (or anti-model) to emulate, appropriate or reject, and above all as a 100 year experiment of republicanism, democracy and liberty in practice. Through their writings and discussions of the USA, these Spaniards debated and constructed their own modernity and imagined the place of their nation in the modern world.




Memory and critique: Essays on the history of educatión and school in Spain an Germany


Book Description

Formato del archivo: PDF The present volume collects the updated versions of several contributions already published elsewhere and some new chapters on the history of education in Spain and Germany which have been brought together in this form for the benefit of those attending English-language classes on the topic aimed at international as well as Spanish students. The individual articles function as case studies of different fields in the history of education. They are characterised not only by their difference in focus, but also in the methods and sources they include, providing an insight into the breadth and variety of the field. It is particularly noteworthy that the comparative orientation of several articles moves beyond a national perspective of history, demonstrating concrete examples of the transnational interconnectedness of producing and circulating educational knowledge.




Spanish Women Travelers at Home and Abroad, 1850–1920


Book Description

Between 1850 and 1920 women’s travel and travel writing underwent an explosion. It was an exciting period in the history of travel, a golden age. While transportation had improved, mass tourism had not yet robbed journeys of their aura of adventure. Although British women were at the forefront of this movement, a number of intrepid Spanish women also participated in this new era of travel and travel writing. They transcended general societal limitations imposed on Spanish women at a time when the refrain “la mujer en casa, y con la pata quebrada” described most of their female compatriots, who suffered from legal constraints, lack of education, a husband’s dictates, or little or no money of their own. Spanish Women Travelers at Home and Abroad, 1850–1920: From Tierra del Fuego to the Land of the Midnight Sun analyzes the travels and the travel writings of eleven extraordinary women: Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos (pseud. Colombine), Rosario de Acuña, Carolina Coronado, Emilia Serrano (Baronesa de Wilson), Eva Canel, Cecilia Böhl de Faber (pseud. Fernán Caballero), Princesses Paz and Eulalia de Borbón, Sofía Casanova, and Mother María de Jesús Güell. These Spanish women travelers climbed mountain peaks in their native country, traveled by horseback in the Amazon, observed the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, suffered from el soroche [altitude sickness] in the Andes, admired the midnight sun in Norway, traveled to mission fields in sub-Saharan Africa, and reported on wars in Europe and North Africa, to mention only a few of their accomplishments. The goal of this study is to acquaint English-speaking readers with the narratives of these remarkable women whose works are not available in translation. Besides analyzing their travel narratives and the role of travel in their lives, Spanish Women Travelers includes many long excerpts translated into English for the first time.