Spain Is (Still) Different addresses both theoretical perspectives on the study of tourism in Spain and specific cases of the cultural impact of travel and tourism on Spanish culture in the late eighteenth to early twenty-first centuries. With contributions from experts in leisure and culture studies, literature, film, and art historians from Spain, the UK, and the U.S., this innovative multi-disciplinary volume introduces readers to methodological and practical issues concerning the cultural function of tourism in Spain. The main body of contributions comes from the area of cultural studies. In the introduction, Afinoguenova and Marti-Olivella provide a comprehensive overview of the problematic of tourism in Spain and of diverse approaches to the study of tourism in its relation to Spanish culture. Unlike other collections on tourism studies, this book is aimed to bridge the gap between the social sciences and the humanities. It is structured to provide an example of how experts in different fields can use each other's work in order to achieve a multi-faceted understanding of the phenomenon of tourism and its implications."

Why Catalans insist on their identity. The tragic fate of the millenary personality of Catalonia has rarely been fully appreciated abroad. Since the early eighteenth century its national voice has been submerged and fractured by a centralist state intent on its arbitrary, unitarian vision of a homogenized Spain. Catalan difference has emerged sporadically in the persons of such irrepressible geniuses as Gaudí, Dalí, Miró and Bigas Luna but, in the configuration of modern Europe, the relentlessinevitability of the unified state has imposed and re-imposed its singular cultural voice. The present volume attempts to equip the English-speaking reader with a fuller understanding of the uniqueness and quality of the culture of Catalonia by providing a comprehensive portfolio of the creative contribution of the nation across a broad spectrum of achievement. Though the artistic wealth of the medieval period is acknowledged appropriately, this study, with its focus on the modern age, privileges excellence not only in the more conventional, academic spheres of history, music, language, literature and the arts but also explores the value of more basic, popular experience inareas such as sport, cinema, festivals, cuisine and the city of Barcelona. DOMINIC KEOWN is Reader in Catalan at the University of Cambridge. CONTRIBUTORS: Elisenda Barbé, Robert Davidson, Alexander Ibarz, Louise Johnson, Dominic Keown, Tess Knighton, Jaume Martí-Olivella, Dorothy Noyes, Montserrat Roser i Puig, Antoni Segura, Miquel Strubell.