One of the world's renowned centres of culture, Barcelona is also one of the capitals of modernist art given its associations with the talents of Dali, Picasso, and Gaudi. Jazz Age Barcelona focuses the lenses of cultural studies and urban studies on the avant-garde character of the city during the cosmopolitan Jazz Age, delving into the cultural forces that flourished in Europe between the late 1910s and early 1930s. Studying literary journalism, photography, and the city of Barcelona itself, Robert Davidson argues that the explosion of jazz culture and the avant-garde was predominantly fostered by journalists and their positive reception of innovative new art forms and radical politics.

Using periodicals and recently rediscovered archival material, Davidson considers the relationship between the political pressures of a brutal class war, the grasp of a repressive dictatorship, and the engagement of the city's young intellectuals with Barcelona's culture and environment. Also analysing the 1929 International Exhibition and the down-and-out Raval District - which housed many of the Age's clubs and bars - Jazz Age Barcelona is an insightful portrait of one of the twentieth century's most culturally rich times and places.

Robert Davidson is an associate professor of Spanish and Catalan at the University of Toronto, and the author of Jazz Age Barcelona, also published by University of Toronto Press.

Robert A. Davidson's profile page

• Short-listed, The Canada Prize in the Humanities

‘Davidson’s book is strongly recommended to anyone with an interest in Catalonia and Spain in the early twentieth century, and will be of use to those studying the Europe of the time.’

Modern Language Review; vol 108:02:2013

Davidson's study is both a letter of introduction of Catalan modernism to the critical history of the global avant-garde and a transportation to a vitally creative and provocative lost age.

Hispanic Review, vol 78:04:10

'This book accomplishes a number of important objectives. It succeeds in introducing English speakers to largely unknown Catalan writers and their works and shows how broader cultural movements influenced the cultural life of at least one Spanish city. The book also contributes to a growing literature focused on the relationship between urban space and cultural production.'

American Historical review: April 2011

‘Davidson’s Jazz Age Barcelona is an exemplary study of the relationships between print and popular culture in Barcelona… Scholars of European, Spanish, or Catalan history, media, and print culture, and the fascinating interwar period will certainly enjoy Davidson’s analysis, literary style, and presentation.’

Canadian Journal of History: vol45 : Autumn 2010