This study presents a new reading of the critically neglected work of Carmen Martin Gaite (1925-) in the light of feminist criticism. It views her writing as a whole and relates it to psychoanalysis and philosophical movements such as existentialism. This thesis demonstrates that Martin Gaite's writing makes a major contribution to women's fiction and a fiction that vindicates women and a female point of view to the extent that she has become one of the most important contemporary women writers in Europe. In the first of three sections, I consider the author's early period of writing in the 1940s and 1950s where I consider some of the key aspects of the development of existentialism in Spain. An examination of Spanish society and its attitudes to the role of Spanish women, enables us to understand contemporary anxieties regarding feminism. This is supported by analysis of Gaite's short stories, written under the influence of existentialist ideas, and the study of the novel Entre visillos demonstrates how, by creating a text in which women have to learn to exist for themselves and not only for others, she subverts the dominant concept of existentialism. In the second part, I look at the 1960s and 1970s as a period of change in Spanish society and argue that feminism and psychoanalysis have had a greater influence in her writing. In the novel her Ritmo lento she looks critically at Spanish society from a psychoanalytical approach and with the perspective of a feminism based upon "equality”. Then, after some years of silence and reflection, the writing shifts to a feminism of difference, using psychoanalysis as a means of penetrating the unconscious of her characters. Finally, against the context of the 1980s and 1990s, I analyse her use of fairy tales as a means of subversion and of creating a new society in which women have found a place for themselves.

The two Indigenlsta novels, Balun-Can&n (1957) and Oficio de tinieblas (1962), written by the Mexican author, Rosario Castellanos <1925-1974), deal in a unique way with the problems of gender, class and race in modern Mexico. It will be shown, in this thesis, that what some previous critics have considered to be the solidly 'progressive message' of Castellanos' novels - that women and indigenous communities might break down centuries- old patterns of oppression by gaining lasting access to authority and a sense of self-identity through writing - is undermined by the very discourses of authorship and authority which form her texts. In proposing to examine what these novels say about the concepts of authorship and authority and, more importantly, how they say it, the stage that has been reached by previous criticism of Castellanos' novels must first be addressed. Thus, Chapter 1 provides a review of such scholarship. This is followed by an outline of a new critical basis for the study of these texts which will be informed by ideas from contemporary literary theory. Chapter 2 examines some of Castellanos' non-fiction writing on the issues of language, authorship and identity, and its historical context, in order to establish the discourses which were available at the time. Chapters 3 and 4 consist of a sustained 'close reading' of the novels, analyzing their narrative structures, use of traditional novelistic devices, and how they are formed by prior discourses, such as state ideologies, class and race ideologies, and discourses of feminism and egalitarian politics. The purpose here is to discover how these novels are related to the culture within which they were written, by reading them as 'sites' where discursively-produced meanings from that culture, and beyond, converge and compete.

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This thesis explores the legends of Saints George, Sebastian, and Eustace as presented in five fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts of the corpus of Castilian prose hagiography known as Compilation B. Chapter One provides an introduction to the thematic and codicological contexts of the legends, asking whether it is possible to identify unifying literary or conceptual features. An analysis of the prehistory of the accounts is presented in Chapter Two, which explores how they were reworked into Castilian from their Latin forms in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea (ca. 1260). Chapter Three presents codicological, textual, and palaeographic studies of each manuscript in order to establish hypotheses of textual affiliation. The second half of the thesis offers a thematic and conceptual analysis of the three legends. Chapter Four looks at the tension between knighthood and martyrdom in representations of George, exploring the rich interpretations that are made possible by the juxtaposition of the secular and the religious. Chapter Five examines the nature of social relationships and interweaving narrative strands in the legend of Sebastian in order to assess the use of multiple protagonists. Finally, Chapter Six considers the use of symbolism and typology in the account of Eustace, identifying and exploring the wide range of traditions from which the account draws. The conclusion draws attention to the importance of studying each text both independently and as part of a wider hagiographic and literary discourse. In an appendix, I provide complete editions of each text, presented here for the first time, along with critical apparatus and sample xeroxes of the manuscripts.

This thesis is a study of the figure of the deviant woman in the poetry of medieval Spain; it outlines and establishes paradigms of acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and behaviours. The ideal comportment of woman in the Middle Ages is decreed by the Church and the aristocracy. However, woman is wont to rebel against the strict norms of patriarchy laid down for her. Through close poetic analysis, this thesis aims to expose and analyse women who deviate from the ideal, an axis which is based upon the ideal woman of Fray Martín Alonso de Córdoba’s Jardín de nobles donzellas (1469) and supported by historical contextualisation. Due to the expanse of the medieval poetic corpus, I focus specifically on women in the forms of medieval poetry that were sung: villancicos, canciones, and also serranillas, a strand of the erudite canción. The poems originate in Iberian songbooks (cancioneros), and loose leafs (pliegos sueltos). The modern editions that I use are Brian Dutton & Jineen Krogstad’s El cancionero del siglo XV: c. 1360-1520 (1990-91) and Margit Frenk’s Nuevo corpus de la antigua lírica popular hispánica (siglos XV a XVII) (2003). Initially, I establish the paradigm of the ideal late-medieval woman, whose subservience, chastity, and beauty are at the fore of her representation. Throughout the thesis, deviant women are seen to subvert these expectations in a variety of ways; principally through their promiscuity and dominant manner. Although for the most part, deviant women are portrayed in lyrics, the canciones also provide portrayals of deviant women that are less perceptible, yet still fascinating. An overall typology of deviant women has been established through the thesis, but equally significantly, close readings of many of the poems will augment the comprehension of the wider corpus.

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The importance of the theme of time and history in contemporary ideology can be amply illustrated from twentieth-century Spanish literature. This reflects a general Western tendency: time has become an almost obsessive concern and finds expression as such in the works of Proust, Ortega and Faulkner, to mention only three of a host of relevant figures. The Spanish novel boasts a large number of works illustrative of the theme. Fiction, as a literary genre, is especially apt for the expression of the idea of time, for its very form is temporal in nature: the writer constructs his work in the medium of time, the reader peruses it in a temporal process of assimilation and, on a more profound level, the novel's plot represents a fictional duration, an action which can only occur in a developing context of time. "Plot", here, is to be considered synonymous with 'horizontal structure', by which is meant the development of the novel's thematic and narrative elements throughout the work's consecutive form. Levi-Strauss provides a useful definition which may be applied to stock literary teaminology: "Form is defined by opposition to a content which is foreign to it; but structure has no distinct content. It is the content itself apprehended in a logical organisation. A novel's structure is the embodiment of meaning in form; since it is fundamentally dynamic and temporal, this structure may ideally represent the meaning, or human significance, which is embodied in nan's experience of time. In the context of contemporary culture and sensibility, this meaning is uncertain: since the turn of the century, time has been conceived of as a negative property of the human condition. The collapse of faith in a meaningful universe has given rise to a metaphysic of vital dis¬ orientation which has resulted in a pessimistic evaluation of time and history. Some authors of fiction write specifically about time; a number of these may write about the metaphysical implications of time; but only a minority succeed in creating a novel-form which incorporates an organic correspondence between a content and a structure both subordinate to the generic theme of time. This thesis purports to examine certain novelistic structures found in a small group of twentieth-century Spanish novels, and to relate them to the concepts of time defined in those works. Human experience is here accorded formal expression via a structure which emphasises the problematical nature of the contemporary response to time as an essential property of the human condition.

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