Focusing on the inter-relationships of aesthetics, identities, and politics as they crystallized in Madrid's cultural scene from the early 1920s to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Gesser illuminates the role artistic and intellectual vanguards played in shaping the aesthetic, socio-political, and national identities that were at stake in Spain during those crucial years. She shows how artists, poets, dramatists, and intellectuals--through their writing, their journals, and their activism--fueled the central axes of debates that later polarized Spanish society in apparently unbridgeable dichotomies: such as right wing/left wing, authoritarian/democratic, religious/secular, centralist/regionalist, and bourgeois/proletariat. Distributed in the US by IPG. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)