One of the most prolific writers in contemporary Portuguese literature, Jorge de Sena is the author of extensive epistolographic writings. Seven books of correspondence have been published, while ten others are in press. This dissertation focuses on the place of epistolography in Jorge de Sena's literary corpus. The author believes that no literary form is less important than another. Every single text plays a role in the author's creative universe. The letters, as products of Sena's creativity as a writer, might be thought of as representing leitmotivs of his poetry and fiction. The act of writing resonates with the poet's mission of actively witnessing the pilgrimage of humankind. A prominent modern humanist among contemporary writers, Jorge de Sena authored an epistolographic oeuvre whose classic structure and form connote the ultimate purpose of the written text—one that signifies the struggle of humanity in its metamorphic journey towards a “paradise” lost and regained in and by each and every human being. The first chapter of the dissertation describes and explains the main topics of the correspondence of Jorge de Sena. This introductory part of the study constitutes a justification and explanation of the maps and charts contained in the appendices. The second chapter constitutes a critical approach to the aesthetics of the letters written by the author. The issues herein discussed bring us to the conclusion that Jorge de Sena, following the traditional model of letter writing, draws from its classic meanings into a contemporary significance of epistolography: the letter serves as a vehicle to a more in-depth reading of a writer's other literary works. The third chapter studies the letter as an important element of the author's humanistic poetics. A letter is primarily a carrier of a specific message to an individualized reader. In a broader literary context, however, the letter expands its meaning, and becomes a component, with the other written works, of the very own purpose of poetry, that is, to be an active witness of the human journey in this earthly reality. The chapter concludes with the analysis of the letters between Jorge de Sena and his wife, Mécia de Sena. This particular book of correspondence, bearing the meaningful subtitle “(Cartas de Amor)”, illustrates the author's fundamental beliefs that love and happiness are the utmost goals of humankind; and that art—and more specifically poetry (in verse and prose)—is a testament to our struggle to reach those goals. The fourth chapter discusses the role played by the correspondence in the emergence of the theme of exile in most of the author's works of fiction and poetry. The letters of Jorge de Sena, who considers himself to be an emigrant in a “voluntary exile”, are to be considered a key element of the metaphor of exile inherent in the very act of writing. The correspondence of Jorge de Sena belongs by nature to his literary corpus for it amplifies the meaning and the message of his other works. By expanding meaning and message, the epistolography becomes one more privileged space constantly “infected” by the humanistic nature of Jorge de Sena's poetics.

This dissertation analyzes the treatment of memory by four authors of the same generation—all born in the 1950's—in four novels of the late 1980's and 1990's: El jinete polaco by Antonio Muñoz Molina, El lápiz del carpintero by Manuel Rivas, Todas las almas by Javier Marías, and La lluvia amarilla by Julio Llamazares. Using Walter Benjamin's dialectics of melancholia as a framework, the first chapter studies how contemporary Spanish historiography and literature recreate recent Spanish history. The study focuses on the representation of the change from a rural country with an oral and collective memory to a society that undergoes a fast process of modernization and, almost simultaneously, postmodernization. The subsequent chapters analyze the novels using the principles of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and post-deconstructivist theories, which postulate a new understanding of the subject based on an ethical relationship with the Other. These chapters further observe a melancholic relationship with the past. This sensation of loss leads the narrators to search for their past in a series of objects which materialize the loss of meaning and the presence of the past in the present. Their narratives are a work of mourning which simultaneously recreates and listens to the voices of the dead informing the narrator's self. The dissertation points out the difference between the sense of melancholia present in the novels of Muñoz Molina, Rivas and Llamazares, which is caused by a historical trauma, and the sense of melancholia created in Marias' work, this one the effect of a transhistorical or structural trauma. Likewise, while in El jinete polaco, El lápiz del carpintero and La lluvia amarilla the work of memory is based on an ethical relationship with the past, in Todas las almas the constructive work of memory adopts a more ludic tone.

Mi disertación se ocupa de la narrativa de ficción del escritor argentino Enrique Anderson Imbert porque es una parte fundamental de su obra que no ha sido suficientemente difundida y mucho menos estudiada. La temática de los relatos de Anderson Imbert se basa en un deseo único: rechazar la realidad cotidiana y sustituirla por un mundo propio, proceso durante el cual surgen los hechos fantásticos. Opino que su técnica ofrece otra aproximación a la literatura fantástica, ya que los elementos extraordinarios incorporados al relato nacen de sus ideas, son un reflejo de sus bases filosóficas, un solipsismo arraigado en el que el sujeto aparece como un ser universal que se repite en el tiempo. Esta noción se corresponde con lo inconsciente colectivo de Carl Jung quien sostiene que sus contenidos y modos de comportamiento son iguales en todos los individuos. Así, selecciono un grupo de cuentos y minicuentos donde lo fantástico ocurre debido a desfasajes temporales que afectan la temporalidad del narrador y de los personajes creando un mundo caótico sin posibilidad de salida. Para analizar los cuentos me apoyo en un marco teórico que abarca, en principio, diferentes postulados sobre las teorías de lo fantástico, aunque el núcleo de mi estudio se basa en los postulados de Tsvetan Todorov v Rosalba Campra. En segundo lugar, y como resultado de la inverosimilitud de los hechos, me apoyo en las teorías de Wolfgang Iser y de Umberto Eco quienes estudian, desde diferentes ángulos, la respuesta del lector ante los silencios del texto. En tercer lugar, incluyo los estudios de Carl Jung sobre lo inconsciente colectivo y sobre la relación entre literatura y psicología para examinar el proceso de creación de los cuentos de Anderson Imbert, su funcionamiento y posterior explicación de los hechos sobrenaturales que amenazan y alteran la temporalidad del ser.

The story of king Pelayo is one of the first legends of the Iberian Peninsula after the Moorish invasion of 711. It is clearly a necessary response to this invasion, and also an attempt to legitimize the newly established monarchy of the Kingdom of Asturias. In its effort to restore the "glories" of the now extinct Gothic kingdom, these monarchs needed a miracle and a foundational hero as the backbone of their national historiography. Furthermore, from its early conception until the present day, the legend of Pelayo has never been cast into shadows, and even though it has seldom been a popular story, it has always served as vehicle to the prevailing ideology of its time. In other words, the story of Pelayo was never an innocent one. It has always been subordinated to a very specific ideology and to society's attempts to legitimize itself. This dissertation examines the ties between the historiographic fictions of Spain and the concept of nation-building. My research attempts to analyze the story as it is, a literary fiction that can be traced back to other, older stories and, in short, to prove that this story has been the backbone of Spain's national identity—at least one of them—ever since its first recorded manifestation in the 9th century. The main thesis of this dissertation is not so much the analysis of the origin of this legend—as this is easily found in the Albeldense and Alphonsine chronicles—but, rather, its debt to other "fictions" and its development throughout the Spanish Middle Ages. The different rewritings of the legend during these centuries are an exceptional witness as to what was the prevailing ideology of each different time period, so that, accordingly, every reworking of the legend must be checked against the religious, political and sociological culture that produced it. What is being analysed here is not merely the development of a literary hero, but rather the foundational fiction in which a country's ideological grounds are based.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2601. Adviser: Ronald Sousa. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 271-281) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

The metafictional novel is a novel that draws attention to its own form or construction and systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice, and by so doing poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In other words, the metafictional novel is such that--explicitly or implicitly, and making use of a variety of strategies and techniques--deliberately exposes the fictiveness and artifice of the literary creation. As a tendency, the metafictional novel has been part of the history of literature since the very beginnings of the novelistic genre with the publication of Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha. In the present Dissertation five Spanish novels belonging to four different periods of Spanish Literature have been selected: Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha, Benito Perez Galdos' El amigo Manso, Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla, and Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's Fragmentos de Apocalipsis and La Isla de los Jacintos Cortados. The first chapter is an introduction which refers to the most relevant theories as well as individual contributions to the study of metafiction, establishing the theoretical foundation for the individual and comparative analysis of each of the selected novels studied in the following chapters. These analyses identify the main characteristics of metafiction: its anti-realism, self-consciousness, self-referentiality or self-critical reflexion, the literary theorization within the novel, its playful nature, and the particular importance given to the role of the reader. Departing from the initial question regarding the emergence of a tendency from within the novelistic genre that includes, as part of the novel itself, the preoccupation about the essence of literature, the conclusion is that metafiction can be considered an answer to the "mystery" of literary creation and, therefore, to the interaction between reality and fiction, life and art. On the other hand, all the metafictional novels analyzed here claim, in one way or another, in a lesser or greater degree, a wide and dynamic conception of the novelistic genre and the freedom of creation and imagination.

Mário Henrique Leiria is mostly known for his short stories--- Contos do gin tonic and Novos contos do gin---published in the 1970's upon his return to Portugal from a "self-exile" in Brazil that lasted nine years. Little is known of his work composed earlier than 1973. Only some of his poems and drawings were published in anthologies of the Portuguese surrealist movement, together with other short stories. One can say "little is known" of his work in light of the considerable corpus on which the present study is based: poems, plays and short stories, but mostly poems written between 1938 and 1972. It is of utmost importance to mention that the poetic side of this author remains practically unknown to the general public. The objectives of the present dissertation are to bring to light and analyze the dated manuscripts found in the author's archives at the National Library in Lisbon. Due to the fact that Leiria contributed to the surrealist movement in Portugal, and that his surrealist period is his most prolific and aesthetically the most important in his career, this study will be divided into three parts, each of them accounting for one of the poet's three phases, with special emphasis on the second phase: "Leiria's pre-Surrealism", "Leiria's Surrealism", and "Leiria's post-Surrealism". The analysis of the poems comprising each of these phases will demonstrate that the author may be viewed as one of the representatives of literary modernity in Portugal or, more specifically, of the Portuguese vanguard.

The current study is a proposal that heads towards the vision of a polyphonic accompaniment of the evolution of allegory, journeying from a cavern, to the soul and out into the spheres of knowledge and representation. It examines the evolution of allegory from antiquity and goes deep into the study proposed by Walter Benjamin in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, allowing for the analysis that allegory falls into two fields of interpretation: first that of representation, and second that of the articulation. With its articulatory power of expression of a convention, allegory transgresses limits and spaces, becoming a tool of expression and verification of the past through the process of investigation and of research. So being, allegory, a discursive material for the laying out of the past, redirects the reader’s view towards a forgotten, ruined and decadent past that awaits its redemption and incorporation within the historicist discourse. With this in mind, I would argue that allegory in the works of Carpentier and Saramago, far from being a stylistic device seen by critics as a way of escaping censorship, is a poetics resulting from repositioning history through the displacement of what is already signified, bringing forth, as a crucial component of History the decadent, the displaced, the ruins and the marginalized. Allegory is a way of disrupting, transforming and subverting—through the very archival work carried out by both authors—, the temporal and territorial vocality of definitive histories and official languages, mythologies and the politics of inherited Manichean allegories that typify the rhetoric of nationhood and nationalism. Works such as El arpa y la sombra, Los pasos perdidos and “Viaje a la semilla” of Alejo Carpentier and Memorial do Convento, A Jangada de Pedra and A Caverna of José Saramago examine a circular vision of life and history and its discontinuities, the decadent phases of history that beg to be exposed in the decadent ruins of its reality. Allegory, in my analysis, is the means through which man and history are only saved by exposing the past, failures, and decadence from the time of the lost Paradise.

<p> This study examines the representation of women in Emile Zola&rsquo;s famous series Les Rougon-Macquart. Critics have described Zola&rsquo;s novels and their presentation of women as misogynist, yet this judgment obscures many of the textual details establishing the female protagonists&rsquo; relationships to industrial capitalism and the rapidly changing social landscape in late nineteenth century France. This study reexamines the narrative synthesis between Zola&rsquo;s naturalist &ldquo;objective&rdquo; narrator and his female protagonists. It also highlights one particular pairing that of Adelaide Fouque and her opportunist daughter-in-law, Felicit&eacute; Puch: Whereas Adelaide, the biological matriarch of the family who figures in each of the twenty novels, does not have an active voice, Felicit&eacute; as maternal <i>protectrice</i> of the family speaks frankly, even aggressively. Zola uses this pairing to link one generation to the next, a key structural element of his naturalist project. Ultimately, Zola&rsquo;s representation of women is more complex than might otherwise be understood.</p>

<p>Abstract This dissertation is a project that examines the way Middle English romances explore and build a sense of national English/Christian identity, both in opposition to and in incorporation of the Saracen Other. The major primary texts used in this project are Richard Coer de Lion, Firumbras, Bevis of Hampton, The King of Tars, and Thomas Malory?s Morte Darthur. I examine the way crusade romances grapple with the threat of the Middle East and the contention over the Holy Land and treat these romances, in part, as medieval meditations on how the Holy Land (lost during a string of failed or stalemated Crusades) could be won permanently, through war, consumption, or conversion. The literary cannibalism of Saracens in Richard Coer de Lion, the singular or wholesale religious conversions facilitated by female characters, and the figure of Malory?s Palomides all shed light on the medieval English politics of identity: specifically, what it means to be a good Englishman, a good knight, and a good Christian. Drawing on the works of Homi Bhabha, Geraldine Heng, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and Siobhain Bly Calkin, this project fits into the overall conversation that contemplates medieval texts through the lens of postcolonial theory to locate early ideas of empire.