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Comfort and domestic space are complex narratives that can help draw our attention to everything from urban planning, everyday objects, and new technologies to class conflict, racial and ethnic segregation, and the gendering of domestic labour.
Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain delves into the history of ideas surrounding the modern home. It explores how the collective experience of domestic space has been shaped by government ideologues, technocrats, and artists as well as working- and middle-class Spaniards since the late nineteenth century. The book focuses on the social and cultural meanings of domestic space in ways that invite us to cross boundaries between private and public, the particular and the general, the local and the global, and to pay attention to the role of the cultural imagination in making a house into a home.
Considering a wide variety of voices and perspectives that have resulted in new ideas about how to inhabit domestic space, Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars to illuminate the cultural history of everyday life.
Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain examines the evolution of domestic space through an analysis of the media-driven concept of comfort.
- Imprint: University of Toronto Press
- Published: August 2024
- Pages: 390
Susan Larson is the Charles B. Qualia Endowed Chair of Romance Languages at Texas Tech University.
“In this brilliant collective work, the effective editing work of Susan Larson offers us sixteen contributions that constitute an interdisciplinary research about the relationships between architecture, domestic space, and comfort and about the representation of this problem in contemporary Spanish cinema. It is a fundamental book not only for its essential contribution to the knowledge of architecture and cinema of contemporary Spain, but also for its status as a methodological model for the study of the relationships between architecture and other areas of contemporary culture.”
Juan Calatrava, Full Professor of Architectural History, University of Granada“Pushing beyond inherited ideas about Spain's relationship to modernity and modernization, Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain asks readers to explore in a nuanced and culturally specific way what the home means for personal and collective identities when excavated through the cultural images, government regulations, and popular media of twentieth-century Spain. The essays in this collection – all of which emerged in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic – offer bold, original readings of the domestic and institutional spaces we inhabit, but rarely write about, that are critical to thinking anew about such crucial and, as we have learned, interdependent topics as intimacy and confinement.”
Jordana Mendelson, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University“What is well-being? What is a home? Employing a rigorous approach to cultural studies, Susan Larson manages to answer these questions, never so current as today, expertly tracing the tricky and exciting drawing of the popular culture of Spanish modernity through the examination of the imaginaries of comfort linked to domestic architecture.”
Eduardo Prieto, Associate Professor of History of Architecture and Art, Universidad Politécnica de MadridChapters
PreviewEPUB PDFSection I: Key Questions and Possible Approaches
Section II: The Real and Imagined Spaces of the Living Room, Kitchen, Bath, and Bedroom
6
Inside the Bedroom: Between Constraint and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century Cinema and Architecture
- Christine Fontaine
pp117–135
Section III: Comfort and Domestic Space in Spanish Popular Culture, 1896–1960
8
The Modernization and Mechanization of the Kitchen as a Female Space in Spanish Cinema, 1940–1960
- Alba Zarza-Arribas
pp164–185
9
From Functional Hygiene to Unattainable Sensuality: The Bathroom in Spanish Cinema and the Press during the Franco Regime, 1939–1960
- Josefina González Cubero
pp186–514
10
Together, Alone, and in the Same Place: The Cinematic Living Room in 1950s Spain
- Adam L. Winkel
pp215–232
11
Exposed Intimacies and Domestic Spaces: Bedrooms in Spanish Cinema, 1939–1960
- Ana Fernández-Cebrián
pp233–248
Section IV: Comfort and Domestic Space in Spanish Popular Culture since 1960
14
Comfort with(out) Comfort: New Couches and Conflicting Values in the Late Franco Comedy
- Jorge Pérez
pp290–307