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This study examines images and texts by Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, which demonstrate an attempt at self-fashioning or selfdefinition, within a Surrealist aesthetic. Given Andre Breton's belief that through his desire for woman he could tap into his creative subconscious, this discussion asks to what extent the artists' endeavours were tempered or mediated by desire. Via a close reading of images and texts created by a collection of artists and poets chosen for the synthesis of their artistic vision, this study aims to demonstrate how Surrealism lends itself to the articulation of complex identity questions. The inclusion of painters and poets, both male and female, allows for an interrogation of the implications of gender and genre in their work. The artworks studied demonstrate that, despite the slight difference in era between Lorca and Alberti, and Varo and Carrington, they all use the malleability of Surrealism, by means of imagery of metamorphosis, decomposition and obfuscation, in works which question subjectivity and articulate a search for the self. The artists' articulations of desire which range from Remedios Varo's subtle imagery of inhuman bodies intertwining to Rafael Alberti's violent images of mortification to repress forbidden impulses form an important part of their coming of age in a Surrealist aesthetic but do not, as Breton conceived of it, act as a medium to uncover a greater truth. This study will show that united in their marginal association to the Surrealist movement, Lorca, Alberti, Varo and Carrington, all created works which demonstrate a sense of tension between two opposing states, such as subject and object, male and female, and life

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The Marketing and Reception of Women Writers in the Twenty-First Century Spanish Nation-State By Jennifer Anne Rodriguez This thesis is a comparative study of the marketing and reception of women writers in the twenty-first century Spanish nation-state; more specifically, Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque Country and central Spain. This study analyses and discusses the strategies women writers in the Spanish nation-state use to achieve success and visibility within their respective literary fields, and also takes into account the complex situation that surrounds these women writers. As such, this thesis also discusses issues including language choice and national identity, as well as how women writers negotiate their position with their respective literary fields. Taking a cultural studies approach, this thesis takes eight women writers as case studies: María Xosé Queizán and María Reimóndez (Galicia); Mariasun Landa and Laura Mintegi (the Basque Country); Carme Riera and Maria de la Pau Janer (Catalonia); and Almudena Grandes and Lucía Etxebarria (central Spain) and examines the individual strategies they use to market their work and achieve success, associating themselves with canonical authors and careful use of paratexts such as prologues and epilogues. In addition, the reception of their mediated identities and their work is discussed through analysis of reviews and interviews in the press. This thesis shows that that women writers in the Spanish nation-state are engaged constantly in a complex negotiation of various inter-dependent factors. Achieving success – both economic and symbolic – is a complex process, and there may often be cases where economic success can be detrimental to symbolic success, or vice versa. However, if women writers in the Spanish nation-state are able to negotiate these complex inter-dependent factors, success – both economic and symbolic -, prestige and even canonisation are achievable.

This interdisciplinary examination of literary texts and photography captures how Surrealism co-determined the identity construction of Spain 1927-1937 and Mexico 1930-1956. During the second quarter of the 20th Century, Surrealism travelled outside the French borders. Surrealist poets and artists were welcome in Spain and Mexico. Amongst them was the French poet André Breton. Drawing on poetry, prose, plays and photography, this thesis explores spaces and symbolic relations between certain elements of the landscape that were essential to Spanish and Mexican Surrealists and that had a direct relationship with the French poet. The central aim is to explore key spaces in which, myth, history and nature are inserted in their work, to suggest a new and vanguardist landscape. This thesis reveals that Surrealism played a key role in constructing a national identity in Tenerife and Mexico through urban and natural landscapes as a response to historical events. The method interweaves intertextual analysis of key poems, prose, plays and photographs with a theoretical surrealist frame (the manifestoes of Andre Breton and other essays) and literary contextualization. Utilising texts by Surrealist authors as well as translations from French authors, such as Breton, Péret or Artaud, as the main source, the case studies in this thesis show how urban and natural landscapes were essential and inherent in the reflection and construction of identity. This interdisciplinary examination of literary texts and photography captures how Surrealism co-determined the identity construction of Spain 1927-1937 and Mexico 1930-1956.

Literary responses to Republican exile are diverse and autobiographical works have emerged as a significant modality of this exilic literature. Utilising poetics as a mode of inquiry, this thesis aims to examine some of the complex and nuanced ways in which exile has shaped autobiographical writing by both first and second-generation female exiles. To this end, I trace a poetics of exile in a selected corpus of nineteen autobiographical works by twelve authors: Constancia de la Mora, Isabel Oyarzábal de Palencia, Silvia Mistral, Clara Campoamor, Victoria Kent, Luisa Carnés, Remedios Oliva Berenguer, Francisca Muñoz Alday, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, María Rosa Lojo, María Luisa Elío and Arantzazu Amezaga Iribarren. These texts were published across a seventy year period (1939 – 2009) in a number of geographical locations and written in a variety of circumstances. Exilic autobiographical texts are not homogeneous and relatively few have adhered to traditional models of autobiography. As such, the works examined are drawn from a variety of autobiographical sub-genres including propagandistic autobiographies, diaries, political essays, hybrid texts, autofiction, memoirs, childhood autobiographies, more experimental semi-autobiographical texts and a film. The main body of this thesis presents six aspects of a poetics of exile — the notion of the addressee, generic hybridization, polyphony, the propagation of collective memory, postmemory, and retroprogressive representations of childhood — and adopts a multi-disciplinary approach that draws upon a number of fields. This thesis aims to offer an illumination of the breadth and difference of women's exilic autobiographical writing as highlighted in the identification of six very different aspects of a poetics of exile.

From 1492, when the first European invaders set foot on the island known today as Hispaniola, until 1965, the year of the April Revolution, the multi-faceted repercussions of invasion have been a prevalent theme within the Dominican Republic’s literature. This thesis examines how the country has amalgamated a roller-coaster past to reflect this in its writing. It starts by evaluating the Spanish invaders’ extermination of the Tainos, its generational influence and the continued impact of Trujillo’s legacy, highlighting the issue of gender within the Resistance movement. It presents a rigorous analysis of writers’ opinions, as transmitters of peoples’ views – from the pirate attack by Francis Drake, to the use of theatre by Independence fighters as a weapon of propaganda against the Haitian invasion; the resilience of peasant-culture represented in the guerrilla movement against the first U.S. invasion of the 20th century; to the exposition of novels to depict a dictator as an ‘invader from within’ and the use of poetry to face the bullets of the U.S. invasion of 1965. By analysing the literary images, expressions, statements and social commitment of the writers throughout their work, this study shows how the various invasions which occurred in the Dominican Republic have been rooted in Dominican discourse. It emphasises that these very struggles against invasion are at the core of its vibrant literature, providing its silent themes and serving to illuminate both the nation as a whole and the individuals within it.

This thesis examines female political imprisonment during the early part of Spain’s Franco regime through the life narratives by Carlota O’Neill, Tomasa Cuevas, Juana Doña, and Soledad Real published during the transition. It proposes the foregrounding notion of the ‘No/Body’ to describe the literary, social, and historical eradication and exemplification of the female prisoner as deviant. Using critical theories of genre, gender and sexuality, sociology and philosophy, and human geography, it discusses the concepts of subject, abject, spatiality, habitus, and the mirror to analyse the intersecting, influential factors in the (re)production of dominant discourses within Francoist and post-Francoist society that are interrogated throughout the corpus. In coining the concept of the ‘No/Body’ as a methodological approach, a narrative form, and a socio-political subject position, this thesis repositions the marginal and the (in)visible as an essential aspect of female carcerality. Read through this concept, the narratives begin to dismantle and rewrite dominant narratives of gender and genre for the female prisoner in such a way that the texts foreground the ‘No/Body’. This thesis thus presents the narrative corpus of lost testimonies as a form of radical textual and political practice within contemporary Spanish historiography.

As an output of the HERA Travelling Texts project, created with the aim of uncovering the realities of women’s literary culture on the fringes of Europe during the long nineteenth century, this study was conceptualised to find out more about the networks of women writers in Spain around 1900, using the digitised corpuses of contemporaneous periodicals as the primary source material. Each chapter of the study centres on a particular periodical, which is used as the starting point for the community of writers and readers, both real and imagined. This thesis looks at the realities of the literary culture for creative women in the late nineteenth century-early twentieth century, exploring the strategies used by women (and men) to support each other in their literary endeavours, how they took inspiration and courage from each other, how they promoted their own names, and how they were received by wider society. The study will also focus on the transnational nature of this literary culture, looking at how women of different nations influenced each other’s work, with a view to understanding more about how cultural change takes place. Finally, this thesis hopes to persuade the reader that the periodical is a rich and under-utilised resource for discovering more about the lives of women writers and their network of relationships.

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