This thesis creates a gendered typology of women’s testimonio that foregrounds the Cold War context of the genre. This new perspective reveals that contrary to the assertions of some critics, the texts struggle to convey a unitary propagandic message. Rather, their prime purpose is to counter hegemonic discourse. Yet, far from being unliterary or impersonal, they impart much personal information using a diversity of stylistic devices. The testimonios challenge the profoundly gendered national security discourse of their own governments and the US. The argument that brutal counter-insurgency tactics, widespread incarceration and torture, were necessary to combat “communist-inspired” insurgency is invalidated by these testimonios which replace dichotomising and reductionist Cold War propaganda with accounts of the local, subjective and personal reasons for political involvement. The texts disclose the potentially traumatising lived consequences of US foreign policy and national security strategies to reveal their disproportionate and excessive nature. However, the testimonialistas’ sense of a greater purpose, collective identity and belonging to a wider community enables them to remain resilient in spite of adverse experiences. Despite their loyalty to utopian and egalitarian ideals, sexism from within leftist movements and governments is exposed and denounced by the female protagonists as patriarchal institutions, traditions and gendered identities are consistently undermined. Latin American women, as guerrilleras, organisers and members of peasant and indigenous communities, present themselves as defiant protagonists who, aside from the male-dominated master narratives of the superpowers, demonstrate the strength of their political agency, psychological resilience and ideological convictions.

This thesis proposes to read Argentine postdictatorship fictions of the 1980s–2000s not, as has frequently been the case, from the point of view of mourning, memory and defeat but from a more positive perspective oriented towards the reconstruction of a fuller national history and identity. As in Borges’s “Pierre Menard”, the argument is essentially a critical hermeneutic one: it is based on a dynamic rather than static thinking of history and textuality that seeks to open up the reading of texts to the present rather than leave their interpretation statically closed off in the past. The social, political, and economic crisis known as “the Argentinazo” (December 2001), the annulment of the Amnesty Laws in August 2003, and the politics of memory and human rights that ensued thereafter provide in this thesis a distinct historical context from which to rethink both “early” (1980s/1990s) and “new” (post–2001) postdictatorial literature. My suggestion all along is that the linkage of literature, artistic and activist cultural politics, including a politicised reading of literature, will necessarily have as its aim the formation of a popular or collective critical consciousness. Overall the main contributions of this thesis are twofold. Firstly, the interpretation of postdictatorial fictions from a pedagogico-political perspective makes the textual analysis of these fictions new and original in their own right. And secondly, this research demonstrates that postdictatorial fictions constitute a cultural reservoir or a cultural archive of historical resistance, dissent, and human rights struggles from which it is hoped present and future generations can learn to live more democratically.

Questions of gender, feminism, and écriture feminine in individual cases continue to be given priority in studies of women’s writing in Baroque Spain, to the exclusion of study of the wealth of original sources that show women participating freely and equally in all aspects of the Republic of Letters, as contemporaries called the literary profession. My doctoral thesis seeks to correct this imbalance by charting the rise and consolidation of the status and image of women as authors in and around the period now recognized as having seen the beginnings of the literary profession, 1600-1650. I take as my field the república literaria in the Spanish Atlantic empire in the period 1450–1700, with parallels from England, France and Italy. Using Genette’s studies of the paratext (2001) and Darnton’s theory of the “communication circuit” (2006), and building on the work of cultural historians (Bouza 1992, 1997, 2001; Bourdieu 1993; Chartier 1994; Cayuela 1996 & 2005), I examine the role of women as authors and readers, chiefly through an analysis of the discourse of their paratexts in a representative corpus of texts patronized, written, or published by women in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish. The key criterion of selection has been the projection of a female voice in public texts, whether via a sobriquet, a real name, grammatical gender, or a pseudonym. However, where appropriate, it has been extended to include also literary correspondence, book inventories, and texts, which despite being published anonymously, have been shown to be by women. The study is divided into two parts wherein extant sources have been selected and arranged chronologically and by theme, rather than by author. Part I, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, examines the rise and expansion of women’s symbolic capital in the public literary sphere. Part II, comprising Chapters 3 and 4, shows that, by the seventeenth century, women’s literary practices had achieved commercial, professional and didactic renown on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter 1 shows the rhetorical significance embedded in women’s first metadiscourses, whether in identifiable or anonymous authorship, dating back to the fifteenth century. Chapter 2 illustrates women’s rising literary authority by reviewing their public endeavours and literary self-consciouness in the sixteenth century. Chapter 3 shows the rise of discourses of fame and professionalization in single publications by identifiable female authors, a shift most noticeable in commercial traditions in print (ephemera, the novela and the theatre). Chapter 4 challenges the fallacy that women chose anonymity or hid behind a patron (or publisher) because of their sexual difference. It thus assesses whether the question of women’s literary successes ultimately depended on a negation of their female sex —through publishing anonymously, under a pseudonym, or in the name of a publisher— or was, rather, influenced by their authorial intent, social and religious status. In sum, the thesis shows that women’s sexual difference did not prevent them from gaining a successful and recognized place within the rising Republic of Letters, but was on the contrary turned to their advantage as a promotional point. Women were as important as men as agents in the emergence of the modern concept of the author as independent artist.

Emerging organically in the 1960s and soon incorporated into the revolutionary leadership‟s official drive to democratise culture, the Cuban talleres literarios have expanded over the decades into a significant literary movement based on grassroots participation. In 2009, the municipio-based talleres literarios, open to mass participation, engaged over 40,000 talleristas in creating their own literature, with a smaller number involved in more specialised talleres literarios de vanguardia, including the one based within the Centro de Formación Literaria Onelio Jorge Cardoso, a national institution for young writers of narrative fiction. This thesis analyses this unique and under-researched cultural movement by placing it within its historical context and using the notion of Cuban cultural citizenship in order to assess its impact. It contends that the talleres literarios in Cuba, by acting as literary public spheres, have provided a broad range of people with the opportunity to gain and enact cultural citizenship, thus endowing the movement with a political and social significance which has largely been ignored by academic literature. The shared experience of the talleres literarios has formed Cuban cultural citizens who not only are invested in some of the core values of the revolutionary process, but who also have the tools and space with which to participate actively in the construction of meanings. In this way, Cuban cultural citizens formed within the talleres literarios benefit individually through gaining a sense of belonging to, and empowerment in, the literary world, whilst also contributing to the evolution of cubanía revolucionaria and the ongoing negotiation of revolutionary hegemony. The thesis follows the recent work on Cuban culture which rejects the liberal assumptions that the cultural and political spheres should not mix and that civil society and the state are two distinct and oppositional entities. Instead, it uses the conceptual framework of cultural citizenship, which is based on the theoretical premise that culture and politics are inseparable, in order to approach critically the talleres literarios as sites for cultural participation. It offers a detailed history of the movement, from its origins to the present day, as well as an evaluation of the shared experience of talleristas based on the voices of participants from different periods and levels of the movement. By focussing on an outcome of cultural democratisation, the thesis poses a challenge to conventional accounts of revolutionary cultural policy and literature. It argues that cultural policy should be viewed as a productive as well as regulatory force, because the talleres literarios have been instrumental in creating a broad and inclusive literary culture which emphasises dialogic communication and active, public participation. The cultural citizenship attainable in the talleres literarios has provided the initial phase in the literary education of many established writers, fostered personal relationships between them, and facilitated the circulation of diverse ideas. Finally, the notion of cultural citizenship also adds a further dimension to the already broad field of research on participation and political culture. This case study of the talleres literarios follows the approach to participation that views it not in terms of top-down control or achievement of consensus but as a process by which shared meanings are both reinforced and new ones created as society and state interact within institutional frameworks.

En el marco de los actuales debates sobre los cambios económicos, políticos y culturales producidos en España a raíz de la instauración democrática y la progresiva incorporación al proyecto de unificación de la Unión Europea, se ha ido poniendo de manifiesto la necesidad de indagar detalladarnente en los procesos de legitimación que conforman la construcción de identidades nacionales. En el caso de España uno de los principales focos de recientes estudios ha sido la discusión sobre las diferentes formas de continuidad y/o discontinuidad que se produjeron y/o se siguen produciendo en el paso de la dictadura a la democracia. Esta tesis se propone explorar esas continuidades y/o discontinuidades a través de su articulación en las variadas representaciones filmicas y literarias de la madre durante la democracia. La focalización en esta figura surge a raiz del repetido interés que hemos rastreado en los estudios de cine y de literatura de mujeres. Estos tienden a interpreter lo materna como personificación del pasado dictatorial, sin detenerse en las tensiones que pueden estar siendo articuladas por medio de esa figura ni en su relación con la construcción de nuevos discursos en democracia. Nuestro estudio ofrece, en primer lugar, una contextualización historico-psicoanalítica que sirva para enmarcar la discusion en relación al discurso franquista sobre la maternidad, a la importancia de la figura materna en la constitución de sujetos, conforme ha sido teorizada por el psicoanálisis, y a las imágenes de la maternidad proyectadas por la cultura occidental. Seguidamente, el aná1isis textual de las novelas y las peliculas elegidas está dividido en tres secciones, las cuales abordan, respectivamente: lo materna como amenaza, como marginal y como renovada heterodoxia. Consideramos que esas representaciones articulan las fricciones resultantes de: un intento de conjurar las conexiones entre el proyecto democrático y el régimen democrático, un oscurecimiento de las estrategias de exclusión y/o instrumentalización de diferencias de clase, región, etnia y género que operan en la legitimación de discursos democráticos, y una necesidad de entender y reinscribir el legado de la dictadura en formas no perpetuadoras de las narrativas hegemónicas.

La presente investigación establece la relación existente entre la violencia urbana colombiana y su representación literaria. En realidad, este trabajo presenta la forma en que la literatura rearticula espacios, sujetos y culturas locales desde la industrial global, reafirmando estereotipos e imaginarios construidos desde el afuera. La literatura, particularmente la novela colombiana contemporánea del sicarato, revela los códigos simbólicos que constituyen el imaginario de Medellín, contribuyendo al modo en qué leemos y habitamos la ciudad. En este estudio se intentará demostrar el modo en qué los textos literarios analizados, a partir de la posición de los narradores y la traducción o mediación del discurso y lenguaje del Otro, en este caso el sicario, refuerzan la invisible pere ineludible división interna existente en la ciudad de Medellín y continúan estigmantizándola al definirla como el lugar del caos y la fragmentación. Pero además, se observará cómo las narraciones no soló no logran sostener un diálogo con el discurso oficial, sine que, a partir de ciertos regimenes de valor, convierten al sujeto subalterno en objeto narrativo. Para tales fines, se mostrará cómo la ciudad ha sido un lugar conflictivo por excelencia y, por otra parte, se cuestionará, a partir de una síntesis de distintas teorías sobre subalternidad, el lugar del Otro en la literatura urbana colombiana de entresiglos.

Existing critical response to the question of Baudelaire's influence is confined almost exclusively to isolated assumptions articulated by critics who make little attempt, if any, to substantiate their claims, and who, thereby, show scant regard for the burden of proof associated with the study of causal influence. This study proposes to test the validity of such assumptions, and to formulate a more structured appraisal of the issue than has been made hitherto. To this end, it has sought to assemble pertinent evidence and to assess its value as an indication of a real literary debt. Enquiry is structured accordingly. The thesis begins with an exploration of methodological considerations designed to establish the conceptual basis of enquiry (Part One). It then proceeds to study the diffusion of Baudelaire's work in Spain between 1857 and 1910, and, subsequently, to examine critical reaction to the poet during the same period (Part Two). Finally, it studies the theme of Baudelaire's influence in modernismo with reference to the work of six poets whose work is representative of or which, in one case, prefigures the modernista movement in Spain: Manuel Reina, Rubén Darío, Francisco Villaespesa, the brothers Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez. The particular objective of each case study varies according to the evidence available and the extent of existing critical response, but basically these objectives are three in number. First, to analyse unequivocal influences. Second, to ascertain, where no conclusive proof of influence exists, the extent to which the possibility of influence may be entertained. Third, to indicate, where pertinent, that the question merits more detailed examination than is possible in a general survey of this kind. The study concludes that although Baudelaire's work was reasonably well-diffused, his direct influence was slight and can be proven far less than existing preemptory claims suggest.