Culture and Customs of Spain

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Description

Modern Spain is a revelation in this up-to-date overview. Stanton vibrantly describes the startling variety of landscape, people, and culture that make up Spain today. Included are a context chapter and others on religion, customs, media, cinema, literature, performing arts, and visual arts. Students of Spanish and a general audience will be rewarded with engrossing insights into what writer Ernest Hemingway called the very best country of all. Spain is a modern European nation, yet Spaniards are fiercely tied to their individual towns and regionswith their distinct social customs, dialects or languages, foods, landscape, and lifestylesmore than to a united country. Culture and Customs of Spain conveys the extremes, such as the hard-working Catalan contrasted to the leisurely paced Castilian, coexisting in first and third world conditions, and the love/hate relationship with the Catholic Church. Spain's institutions are described, and its contributions to the worldfrom unparalleled literature and cuisine to flamenco and filmmaker Pedro Almodovarare celebrated. A chronology and glossary complement the text.

Reviews

impart much information on a wide range of cultural topics, offering readers jumping-off points for further reasearch. * Multicultural Review *
useful if world history classes need another recent book on this country. * Thomson-Gale Reference for Students *
Recommended as an up-to-date reference on Spain. * Gale-Reference Reviews *
Cultures and Customs of Spain is a lively, readable guide to the diverse cultures and traditions of Spanish SocietyRecommended for academic, school, and public libraries. * American Reference Books Annual *

Author Bio

EDWARD F. STANTON is the Chair of the Department of Spanish and Italian at the University of Kentucky, where he was the first Bingham Professor of the Humanities. He is the author of several books on Hispanic life and literature, including Handbook of Spanish Popular Culture (Greenwood, 1999).