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.

<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.

This dissertation explores the construction and transmission of the concept of authorship in the Italian novella in late-medieval and early modern Italy and England. The notion of authorship during this period undergoes an important shift from medieval conceptions of auctoritas to modern ideas about the role of the author. Tracing the figure of the author through a single genre allows an investigation of the translational mechanisms that affect cross-cultural ideas such as authorship as they move between cultures. This research contributes to knowledge about the formation and translation of cross-cultural concepts as well as to understandings of the role of the author in early modern literature. The literature used to pursue this investigation consists of some of the major and minor works in the genre of the Italian novella in Italy and England. The first chapter establishes the generic and theoretical foundations of both the genre of the Italian novella and medieval ideas about authorship. The first text addressed is the late thirteenth-century anonymous Italian Novellino, which is included in the first chapter as an example of an early novella collection that has some but not all of the characteristics of the developing genre. The subject of the second chapter is the authorial construction of Giovanni Boccaccio in the Decameron, which forms the basis for subsequent research. The third chapter explores how later Italian writers including Francesco Petrarca, Masuccio Salernitano, Matteo Bandello, and Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio modify and expand the Boccaccian models of authorship in their own contributions to the genre. In chapter four, translation comes to the forefront in an examination of how English writers and translators worked with the Italian genre, adapting it for their own purposes. This exploration moves from the work of Geoffrey Chaucer through the major novella collections of the late sixteenth-century and ultimately to the beginnings of "original" English novella production with George Gascoigne and the continuation of the translation tradition with the first complete English translation of Boccaccio's Decameron in 1620. Finally, the fifth chapter unifies a discussion of narrative structure that has proved key in the preceding chapters, exploring how the repetition and recursivity of the texts at hand influences authorial and interpretive constructions.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4325. Adviser: Karen L. Fresco. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 319-339) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.