Modern critical works on the seventeenth-century Extremaduran author Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán are sparse, with the exception of recent interest manifested by a small group of feminist scholars in the United States. Apart from intermittent mentions of her poetry, she is virtually unknown among British Hispanists. This thesis seeks to fill many existing gaps in knowledge on her by providing a broader critical assessment of her surviving poetry than has been available thus far, particularly by situating it and its author within their historical, literary and social contexts and drawing thematic and stylistic analogies with works by other authors, male and female. Part I will concentrate primarily on historical aspects. It will establish the reputation enjoyed by the poet in her day and review references to her work in modern critical literature. It will also provide a detailed reconstruction of the poet's family antecedents and discuss the evidence of a literary community in her home city during the period in which she was active as a writer. Part II will focus on the poetry itself, specifically a consideration of the thematic content of a broad representative selection of Ramírez de Guzmán's verses, which were not published until nearly two centuries after her death, and an examination of her interaction with the genres of occasional verse, verse portraiture and burlesque and satirical poetry, all of which will be discussed against the background of their respective traditions.

Fala is a language which is spoken by nearly six thousand people in towns: Valverde del Fresno, Eljas and San Martín de Trevejo, in the Spanish region of Extremadura. The author translates the self-contained body of information about fala in a way that it is possible to describe the sociolinguistic situation in the area of the research. The first part of the thesis concentrates on the introduction of already familiar data, apart from general information the characteristic signs of the fala language are described, there is also the historic overview focusing on the facts that have influenced the development of the language, and further basic propositions about its origin are mentioned. The second part is drawn as the author's sociolinguistic research, in which the local language representation is the main subject and its results are presented in the following work in five defined parts. The aim of this thesis is to find out and describe the attitude of the speakers towards their language representation; additionally opinions of the inhabitants regarding the current status, use and possible teaching of fala are presented. The last part evaluates the role of fala in the process of the creation of one's identity. The work tries to assess the current sociolinguistic situation, discusses the future of...

Modern critical works on the seventeenth-century Extremaduran author Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán are sparse, with the exception of recent interest manifested by a small group of feminist scholars in the United States. Apart from intermittent mentions of her poetry, she is virtually unknown among British Hispanists. This thesis seeks to fill many existing gaps in knowledge on her by providing a broader critical assessment of her surviving poetry than has been available thus far, particularly by situating it and its author within their historical, literary and social contexts and drawing thematic and stylistic analogies with works by other authors, male and female. Part I will concentrate primarily on historical aspects. It will establish the reputation enjoyed by the poet in her day and review references to her work in modern critical literature. It will also provide a detailed reconstruction of the poet¿s family antecedents and discuss the evidence of a literary community in her home city during the period in which she was active as a writer. Part II will focus on the poetry itself, specifically a consideration of the thematic content of a broad representative selection of Ramírez de Guzmán¿s verses, which were not published until nearly two centuries after her death, and an examination of her interaction with the genres of occasional verse, verse portraiture and burlesque and satirical poetry, all of which will be discussed against the background of their respective traditions.

The urban heat island (UHI) is a phenomenon of noticeably higher temperatures in the cities as compared to their respective surrounding areas. This thesis aims at characterizing the influence of city expansion to the urban heat island phenomenon. The study is carried out in a city of Caceres in the Spanish province of the same name. A model input data is obtained with Landsat multispectral images. The analysis of satellite images shows that functional vegetation cover and water surfaces help in mitigating urban heat island effect. However, the Caceres city expansion does not influence the urban heat island intensity. A possible explanation for it is as the city expanded the ratio of vegetation to dry land remains constant in time.