While the fin de siecle has received considerable attention as a critical concept, the first decade of a new century has been less well studied. The chapters in this volume consider the distinctive cultural significance of the 'noughties' in the Hispanic and Lusophone world, looking at the specific cultural, political and economic circumstances of the decade, and in some cases proposing notions of an identifiable 'noughties sensibility' or 'noughties generation' which may flow out of, or stand in reaction against, the malaise of the fin de siecle. Drawing on specialist, area-specific knowledge, the authors consider the significance of the noughties across different eras. The contributions include chapters on how Brazil is negotiating the complicated terrain of digital literacy; the painful re-examination of the civil war that is taking place in Spain; and the negative effects of the economy on women's lives in Argentina. The chapters examine film, digital media, theatre, fiction, the economy and history, all taking the noughties as a focal point. The multiple perspectives will reveal the commonalities of experiences that a particular period brings about as well as showing up the distinctive local differences.
About the Author: Kathy Bacon is the author of Negotiating Sainthood: Distinction, Cursileria and Saintliness in Spanish Novels (Oxford: Legenda, 2007). She holds a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, and has researched and taught at the University of Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt University, and the University of Stirling. Her research currently focuses upon the appropriation of St Teresa of Avila in the service of discourses of gender and nationhood in Spain from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Niamh Thornton has been a Senior Lecturer in Spanish Language, Latin American Culture and Film Studies at the University of Ulster since 2004. She co-founded, and continues to be an editor of the journal Film and Film Culture. She has published a monograph, Women and the Novela de la Revolucion in Mexico (New York and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006) and two co-edited books, Transcultural Encounters: Film, Literature, Art (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) and Revolucionarias: Gender and Revolution in Latin America (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).