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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.

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INTRODUCTION Antonio Cordoba and Daniel García-Donoso

CHAPTER 1. The Sacred in Madrid´s Soundscape: Towards an Aural Hygiene, 1856-1907 Samuel Llano

CHAPTER 2. Sacred, Sublime, and Supernatural: Religion and the Spanish Capital in Nineteenth-Century Fantastic Narratives Wan Sonya Tang

CHAPTER 3. The Modern Usurer Consecrates the City: Circulation and Displacements in the Torquemada Series Sara Mu¤oz-Muriana

CHAPTER 4. Spirituality and Publicity in Barcelona, 1929: Performing Citizenship between Tradition and Avant-Garde Alberto Medina

CHAPTER 5. The Places of the Subject: Abjection and the Transcendent City in Nada and La pla‡a del Diamant Sarah Thomas
CHAPTER 6. Living Off the Exception: Biopolitical Modernity and Sacratio in Francoist Spain William Viestenz

CHAPTER 7. Urban Avatars of "El Maligno": Sacredness in µlex de la Iglesia´s El día de la bestia and Manuel Martín Cuenca´s Caníbal Antonio Cordoba

CHAPTER 8. Searching the Soul of the City in Rafael Chirbes´s Crematorio Daniel García-Donoso

CHAPTER 9. A New Heaven for a New Earth: Religion in the Contemporary Spanish Novel Nathan Richardson

CHAPTER 10. Media Landscapes of a Well-Dressed Multitude: The City and the Individual in Velvet and El tiempo entre costuras Esteve Sanz and Tatiana Alekseeva

AFTERWORD. The Temple and the City: Contaminations of the Sacred in Modernista Barcelona Joan Ramon Resinaiv

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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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