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The look and feel of metropolitan France has been a notable preoccupation of French literary and visual culture since the 1980s. Numerous writers, filmmakers and photographers have been drawn to articulate France’s contrasting spatial qualities, from infrastructural installations such as roads, rail lines and ports, to peri-urban residential developments and isolated rural enclaves. In doing so, they explore how the country’s acute sense of national identity has been both asserted and challenged in topographic terms. This wide-ranging collection of essays explores how the contemporary concern with space in France has taken shape across a range of media, from recent cinema, documentary filmmaking and photographic projects through to television drama and contemporary fiction, and examines what it reveals about the state of the nation in a post-colonial and post-industrial age. The impact of global flows of capital, trade and migration can be mapped through attention to the specificities of place and topography. Investigation of liminal locations, from seaboard cities and abandoned industrial sites to refugee camps and peasant smallholdings, interrogates the assertion of a national territory (and thereby, a national identity) through the figure of the hexagon, and highlights the fluidities, instabilities and lines of flight which render it increasingly unsettled.

Drawing on historical, literary and cultural studies perspectives, this book examines the phenomenon of the “Returned Yank” in the cultural imagination, taking as its point of departure the most exhaustively discussed Returned Yank narrative, The Quiet Man (dir. John Ford, 1952). Often dismissed as a figure that embodies the sentimentality and nostalgia of Irish America writ large, this study argues that the Returned Yank’s role in the Irish cultural imagination is much more varied and complex than this simplistic construction allows. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, s/he has been widely discussed in broadcast and print media, and depicted in plays, novels, short stories and films. The imagined figure of the Returned Yank has been the driving impetus behind some of Ireland's most well-known touristic endeavours and festivals. In the form of U.S. Presidential visits, s/he has repeatedly been the catalyst for questions surrounding Irish identity. Most significantly, s/he has been mobilised as an arbiter in one of the most important debates in post-Independence Ireland: should Ireland remain a "traditional" society or should it seek to modernise? His/her repeated appearances in Irish literature and culture after 1952 – in remarkably heterogeneous, often very sophisticated ways – refute claims of the “aesthetic caution” of Irish writers, dramatists and filmmakers responding to the tradition/modernity debate.

This book examines how the political period in Spain following Franco's death, known as the Transición, is being remembered by a group of writers, filmmakers and TV producers born in the sixties and early seventies. Reading against the dominant historical account that celebrates Spain’s successful democratisation, this study reveals how recent television, film and fiction recreate this past from a generational perspective, linking the experience of the Transición to the country’s present political and financial crises. Privileging above all an emotional connection, these artists use personal feelings about the past to analyse and revisit the history of their coming-of-age years. Lost in Transition considers the implications of adopting such a subjective positioning towards history that encourages an unending narrative, always in search of more meaningful and intimate connections with the past. Taking into account recent theoretical approaches to memory studies, this book proposes a new look at the production of memory in contemporary Spain and its close relationship to popular culture, shifting the focus from what is remembered to how the past is recalled and made part of the everyday experience.

This book studies texts from the era of the Spanish Transition to democracy, taken here as the period lasting from the 1960s to the 1990s. It offers new readings of some major writers and filmmakers, such as Terenci Moix and Vicente Aranda, but also addresses some who could be better known: defrocked priest and autobiographer Antonio Roig; controversial scholar and fiction-writer Alberto Cardin; and experimental film directors José Maria Nunes, Jacinto Esteva-Grewe and Joaquin Jordà, members of the short-lived movement known as ‘the Barcelona School’. Drawing on some of the most influential theorists and philosophers of our time, the book argues for a radical re-reading of a complex period in Spanish history, which is characterized by amnesia in relation to a painful past and ideological conflict within an unsettling present. It argues that the Transition emerges as the great ‘evental site’ of modern Spain, from which radically new ways of thinking can still emerge.

In an era obsessed with celebrity and glamour, ‘sophistication’ has come to be perceived as the most desirable of human qualities, but it was not always so. This book explores how a word that once meant falsification and perversion came to be regarded as signifying discrimination and refinement. The author provides a literary, linguistic and cultural route from the Romantics, via the emergence of the Dandy and then of Modernism, to that most sophisticated of figures, Noël Coward, and on to the meaning of sophistication in the twenty–first century. Ranging widely across historical documents, magazines, adverts, films and novels, this book will be compulsory reading for sophisticates and scholars.