This thesis aims to study the ways in which literary canonisation occurs and how the academic institution is an integral part of the canonisation process. It takes as its focus the work of the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, who has been publishing since the 1950s and is universally considered an important figure in contemporary Hispanic literature. After contextualising recent debate concerning the literary canon, I discuss the influences and paradigm shifts that have conditioned reception of Goytisolo’s work, bringing him to prominence both inside and outside Spain. The study then addresses the strategies that the author himself uses in his novels to encourage debate and criticism by the institution. Whilst the second and third chapters analyse the distance between reader and novel, focusing on the difficulty of understanding both form and content in Makbara, the following two chapters study Goytisolo’s desire to situate his work in the canon through autobiographical and intertextual references. Analysis is both metacritical, in its examination of critics’ assumptions, and also textual, through its focus on Goytisolo’s novels. To conclude, the thesis demonstrates the symbiotic relationship of the academic institution and the writer, with the literary canon as the key that unlocks their common history.

History and Journalism in Silvia Galvis’s Novels explores the relationship between Galvis’s novels and the influence of two distinctive phenomena in the Spanish American literary tradition: history and journalism. The thesis analyses Galvis’s novels from historical and journalistic perspectives. It explores the main characteristics of the historical novel in order to relate this genre to Galvis’s novels and to assess the extent to which they are historical or not. It draws on Galvis’s historical research on Colombian history and politics to illustrate its relevance in her novels. From a journalistic perspective, the thesis analyses the role of journalism in Spanish America and Colombia in particular, to show the interrelation of this profession with literary writing and the close link between the two professions in Galvis’s novels and columns in El Espectador. The thesis emphasises the constant interrelation between the political history of Colombia and the political function of journalism in the country. It links therefore Galvis’s historical research on politics and journalism with the themes and style of her novels in order to demonstrate this special characteristic of her literary production. It studies the formal mechanisms in Galvis’s novels employed to narrate different periods and places in the history of Colombia and how her columns provide an insight in to her fictional narrative. The thesis also explores on how Galvis’s novels keep alive historical memory in Colombia through the process of writing. Therefore it pays special attention to the role of her characters and narrators as historians, journalists or chroniclers of their own political places and events.

Long overshadowed by the subsequent 1960s ‘Boom’, Cuban novels of the 1950s have been confined to the backwater of literary analysis, often grouped together and dismissed as mere social realism like their Spanish counterparts, or described as inferior. The spatial has been similarly overlooked in literary analysis in favour of a focus on stylistic experimentation, narrative structure, characterisation and the temporal. More recently, however, theorists such as Mitchell (1980) and (1989), and Wegner (2002), have argued that literature has become increasingly spatial, and that a greater focus on spatial analysis is needed. Furthermore, conceptions of space in literature have moved from the static notion of ‘setting’ and identification within a specific location and time, to embrace the function of actual physical spaces, whether exterior or interior, public or private, embedded or liminal, juxtaposed, dynamic, static or fluid. One Cuban novel of the 1950s has already been discussed from a spatial perspective - El acoso (1956) by Alejo Carpentier. Using the two previous studies on spatiality in this novel as a starting point (Stanton [1993] and Vásquez [1996]), this analysis expands on the conclusions made by these studies, stressing the importance of water imagery, and demonstrating that spaces in El acoso are essentially dynamic and female-gendered, arguing that the crisis experienced by the acosado is actually one of masculine identity. Building on the expanded analysis of space in El acoso, three lesser-known Cuban novels of the 1950s are then considered from the perspective of space: Los Valedontes (1953) by Alcides Iznaga, Romelia Vargas (1952) by Surama Ferrer, and La trampa (1956) by Enrique Serpa. The socio-economic, political and cultural backcloth for the novels is set out, before an investigation into theories of space, both literary and non-literary, is conducted. Spaces in Los Valedontes reveal that in the rural domain, sexual identities are stable with conventional masculine hegemony virtually uncontested. Spaces in Romelia Vargas demonstrate that in the urban domain, female sexual identity, albeit historically suppressed, triumphs over the traditionally dominant male norm, whilst a study of spaces in La trampa demonstrates that not only are gangsters, policemen and homosexuals shown to occupy particularly challenged positions, but also that constructions of mainstream Cuban masculinity are under threat. The conclusion compares the function of spaces across all four novels, adding new insights into existing theories of literary space where appropriate. This thesis, therefore, tests the hypothesis that the manipulation of space in these novels constitutes material worthy of study, showing that spaces are dynamic and challenging when female-gendered, and constituting a threat to the hegemony exerted by traditional models of masculinity. Spaces in these novels demonstrate how the early part of the 1950s was a period in which an unpredictable array of contested positions was exposed through cultural, racial, gender and sexual stereotypes, leaving conventional norms of identity open to question.

This thesis interrogates García Márquez’s representations of sexualities in the following selected novels: Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981); The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975); One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); The Sad and Incredible Tale of Innocent Erendira and her Heartless Grandmother (1972); and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004). It is argued here that García Márquez’s employment of the sexuality motif enables him to delve into many worldwide current concerns such as the irrelevance of some socio-cultural sexual practices; commercial sexual exploitation of children; the different manifestations of prostitution; and female powerlessness under autocratic rule. Earlier literary critics have tended to narrowly interpret García Márquez’s employment of the sexuality motif as just a metaphor for colonial exploitation of the colonised. The study also explores the writer’s artistic role and concludes that García Márquez speaks against commercial sexual exploitation of children as he concurrently speaks on behalf of children so exploited. Similarly, the writer speaks on behalf of prostituted womanhood by showing how prostitutional gains do not seem to cascade down to the prostitutes themselves. García Márquez also invests female sexual passivity as a coping mechanism against a dictator’s limitless power over the life and death of his citizens. However, the writer also constructs female agency that grows from the rejection of an initial victimhood to develop into an extremely flawed and corrupt flesh trade that co-opts and indentures children into sex work with impunity. Thus the study breaks new ground to show that García Márquez’s representations of different sexualities are not merely soft porn masquerading as art. His is a voice added to the worldwide concerns over commercial sexual exploitation of children in the main and also the recovery of a self-reliant female self-hood that was previously inextricably bound to male sexual norms. Quite clearly, García Márquez demonstrates that female prostitution is driven by a lack of social safety nets, a lack of other economically viable options and also a distinct lack of educational opportunities for female economic independence, hence the flawed female agency. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)