The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxvii

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2. The Sacred in Madrid’s Soundscape: Toward an Aural Hygiene, 1856–1907

   • Samuel Llano

   Pages 1-20

3. Sacred, Sublime, and Supernatural: Religion and the Spanish Capital in Nineteenth-Century Fantastic Narratives

   • Wan Sonya Tang

   Pages 21-40

4. The Modern Usurer Consecrates the City: Circulation and Displacements in the Torquemada Series

   • Sara Muñoz-Muriana

   Pages 41-60

5. Spirituality and Publicity in Barcelona, 1929: Performing Citizenship between Tradition and Avant-Garde

   • Alberto Medina

   Pages 61-78

6. The Places of the Subject: Abjection and the Transcendent City in Nada and La plaça del Diamant

   • Sarah Thomas

   Pages 79-98

7. Living Off the Exception: Biopolitical Modernity and Sacratio in Francoist Spain

   • William Viestenz

   Pages 99-118

8. Urban Avatars of “El Maligno”: Sacredness in Álex de la Iglesia’s El día de la bestia and Manuel Martín Cuenca’s Caníbal

   • Antonio Cordoba

   Pages 119-137

9. Searching the Soul of the City in Rafael Chirbes’s Crematorio

   • Daniel García-Donoso

   Pages 139-155

10. A New Heaven for a New Earth: Religion in the Contemporary Spanish Novel

    • Nathan Richardson

    Pages 157-176

11. Media Landscapes of a Well-Dressed Multitude: The City and the Individual in Velvet and El tiempo entre costuras

    • Esteve Sanz, Tatiana Alekseeva

    Pages 177-192

12. Back Matter

    Pages 193-211

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This book explores how modernity, the urban, and the sacred overlap in fundamental ways in contemporary Spain. Urban spaces have traditionally been seen as the original sites of modernity, history, progress, and a Weberian systematic disenchantment of the world, while the sacred has been linked to the natural, the rural, mythical past origins, and exemption from historical change. This collection problematizes such clear-cut distinctions as overlaps between the modern urban and the sacred in Spanish culture are explored throughout the volume. Placed in the periphery of Europe, Spain has had a complex relationship with the concept of modernity and commonly understood processes of modernization and secularization, thus offering a unique case-study of the interaction between the modern and the sacred in the city.

• postsecularism
• secularism
• Madrid
• Barcelona
• Spanish literature
• Spanish culture
• Spanish film
• area
• children
• cultural anthropology
• father
• Nation
• pain
• religious studies
• social anthropology
• social science
• sociology
• urban studies

“Religious studies are a critical but rarely explored area in Spanish cultural studies. At a time when secularity is in crisis, and religious ideas crop up in unexpected places, this volume is a timely, much-needed contribution that should pave the way for further explorations of the interplay between the secular and the religious in contemporary Spanish culture.” (Angel Loureiro, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, Princeton University, USA)

“The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain offers, through innovative research and critical thinking, an in-depth analysis of the persistence of the sacred in a secular society. Engaging in excellent dialogue with some of the most important thinkers and cultural historians of religion, urban studies, political theory, and modernity, the essays in this collection open up new areas of cultural and theoretical inquiry about Spanish society and culture. This is a major contribution.” (Cristina Moreiras-Menor, Professorof Spanish and Women's Studies, University of Michigan, USA)

“This collection on representations of cities in Spain is new and engaging. Each essay interrogates the conventional wisdom of ‘the sacred’ as exclusive to pre-modern urban space  . . .  these essays have encouraged me to re-think the very notion of modernity and pre-modernity.” (Michael Ugarte, Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri, USA)

• Manhattan College , Riverdale, USA

  Antonio Cordoba

• Catholic University of America, USA , Washington, DC, USA

  Daniel García-Donoso

Antonio Cordoba is Assistant Professor at Manhattan College, USA. His research focuses on the interaction between modernity, wonder, and the sacred in Latin American culture.


Daniel García-Donoso is Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America, USA. His work explores the relationship between religion and culture in modern and contemporary Spain.

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