Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, arguably the most famous Brazilian author, has been studied perhaps more than any other figure in Brazilian literature. Because Machado's novels are so exceptional, many of his good short stories have been neglected by scholars, particularly those categorized by some as “fantastic.” This study attempts to fill that gap by analyzing the most prominent female characters in Machado's fantastic fiction. After providing a brief overview of the term fantastic and explaining how the stories used qualify as fantastic, this study identifies several tropes into which their female characters fit. Chapter 1: The Femme Fragile analyzes the tropes of woman as foil for rational man and woman as manipulable possession, while Chapter 2: The Femme Fatale examines the tropes of woman as siren and woman as fantastic other. Although these tropes seem to expose Machado's misogyny, in reality they function as his dramatization of the erroneous chauvinist thinking of nineteenth-century Brazil. Machado employs these tropes only to subvert them and the patriarchal thinking on which they are based, allowing his readers to come to more productive ways of seeing gender relations in Brazil.

Maria Anna Acciaioli Tamagnini was a woman of special circumstances. She enjoyed many opportunities in regards to travel, education, as well as liberty of thought. These factors, in conjunction with her youth and ability to write, placed her in a unique situation in which it was possible to publish a book accessible to a large audience. With these opportunities, she searched for happiness, not only for herself, but for women everywhere. The picture of the Chinese woman that she paints with her poetry in the book Lin-Tchi-Fá: Flor da lotus opens a discourse about the situation of women in Macau, in Portugal, and in China. During the 19th and 20th centuries in China, Portugal and Macau, women increasingly fought for their rights. The political climate in which Tamagnini found herself was turbulent in many ways. Of notable importance in Tamagnini's work is the feminist movement what was gaining strength with sharp voices against traditional norms as well as the deep-rooted traditions that had for centuries oppressed women. Tamagnini, because of society's attitude in regard to these feminists, packaged her feminine message with much subtlety. Thus, readers who only wanted to hear a pretty story of the exotic Orient were satisfied, while to those readers with sensibility, she told the story of the woman's search for happiness. This happiness did not come by pleasing any man, but in the self-actualization of each woman.

A ditadura militar brasileira começou em 1964 e terminou em 1985. Durante este período de 21 anos, ao mesmo tempo em que o país viu avanços econômicos, um grande número de brasileiros passaram por experiências traumatizantes de perseguição, torturas, exílios e muitas vezes o desaparecimento de conhecidos, amigos e familiares. Devido à censura, qualquer pessoa que tivesse uma posição comunista ou que pregasse contra o governo militar era perseguida. Por este motivo, muitos não tiveram a oportunidade de escrever ou até protestar as injustiças que sofreram do governo militar durante esta época. No entanto, depois da abertura “lenta e gradual” e da anistia, muitas das vítimas da ditadura começaram a se manifestar através da literatura, hoje chamada de “literatura de testemunho.” Através de narrações fortemente ligadas à sua memória, os sobreviventes fazem depoimentos e constróem o outro lado da história brasileira que foi escondido por anos e em que os responsáveis nunca foram punidos. Através da literatura de testemunho podemos ter acesso a uma outra versão da história que não pode ser apagada por conter depoimentos vivos de sobreviventes que foram guiados por suas memórias para escrever a verdade.

This thesis analyzes the linguistic attitudes of natives from Santiago, Chile regarding three linguistic phenomena present in Chilean Spanish of Santiago: the fricative realization of the Spanish /tʃ/, the assibilated realization of /tɾ/ and the use of the definite article before the first names of people. The social factors of age, sex and socioeconomic status are acknowledged as possible factors contributing to the linguistic attitudes of the 64 participants interviewed.

This thesis investigates the attitudes of the inhabitants of Agost towards Castilian and Valencian Catalan. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire distributed among a representative sample of Agostenses between April and June 2013 and analyzed according to three independent variables: sex, age and education. It was hypothesized that attitudes would covary with these variables and, in general, this proved to be the case.

This project is a transcription and translation of a 21-page annual letter written about the Cochinchina mission for the year 1619 by the Jesuit missionary João Rodrigues Girão. In 1619 the Cochinchina mission consisted of central and southern Vietnam. The two Jesuit residents at this time were located in the city of Faifo, in the province of Cacham, and Nuocman, in the province of Pulocamby. A semi-diplomatic and diplomatic transcription style is used for the transcription, with a dynamic-equivalent (sense-for-sense) style used for the translation.

While Asturian, a language spoken in Northwestern Spain, shows some similarities with Spanish, there is a morphological characteristic that the two languages do not share. Unlike Spanish, Asturian has not only morphemes dedicated to both the masculine (–u) and feminine (–a) genders in its adjectives, but there is also a morpheme that represents the neuter (–o). Related to this morphological characteristic, Asturian exhibits what is standardly called the mass neuter phenomenon. In order for the mass neuter to be present in a grammatically correct sentence in Asturian, certain criteria must be met. For instance, either a masculine or feminine mass noun can be followed by a neuter adjective, and this structure gives a generic interpretation reading. However, it is important to take into account that the same adjective can also agree in gender with the noun that precedes it, in which case the morphological neuter is ungrammatical and the interpretation becomes specific. There also exists a third possibility in which the adjective appears in a prenominal position, in which case the adjective must agree in gender, the interpretation must be specific, and the mass neuter is ruled out. Given the possibilities in gender agreement, specific or generic interpretation, and adjective placement, my study aims to better define the contexts in which the mass neuter in Asturian can and cannot appear in a grammatical sentence, and how the syntactic analysis proposed to account for to the placement of the adjective can shed light to explain the phenomenon under study.

Para hacer este estudio de los tipos y costumbres en los Sueños de Quevedo, he tomado la edición de Julio Cejador y Frauca, titulada Quevedo: Los Sueños. Esta edición es una de dos tomos en los Clásicos castellanos. Así, al pintar a los muchos tipos que hay en la obra, el explicar y mostrar la sátira de Quevedo, tengo que aludir mucho a Los Sueños. Hablo en estas páginas mías de oasi todos los tipos que satiriza Quevedo, pero ni incluyó a los herejes; y esto por varias razones. Primero, no son ellos tipos que podemos apreciar hoy, ni son tan interesantes como los tipos de la vida diaria. Además, al hablar de ellos, Quevedo cuenta la historia de varios herejes, y casi todos los nombres y los incidentes los sacó de varios libros acerca de los herejes que se habían publicado en aquellos tiempos cuando la cuestión era de muy gran importancia. Los tipos de oficiales, de trabajadores, de caballeros y de mujeres, y las costumbres que había entre este grupo me parecen interesantes y muy realistas, aunque muy exagerados en las pinturas de Quevedo.

This dissertation examines the four novels published to date by Milton Hatoum, a contemporary Lebanese-Brazilian author from the Amazon region. There are a great number of critical readings of his work that foreground the postmodern dissolution and fragmentation of the self, of human relationships, and also of national identity. In contrast to such approaches, I propose what I call a reading of hope. I argue that Hatoum is at the forefront of a shift in sensibility in Brazilian literature, one that simultaneously demonstrates certain aspects of postmodernism, but also breaks with other elements of it. In order to illustrate this issue, I analyze how Hatoum's characters forge personal identities, utilizing the mythological symbol of the uroboro (the snake that bites its own tail) as the organizing structure of my analysis. The uroboro has historically been used to represent circularity in the cycles of nature, communal and personal renewal, the return to origins, and self-reflection. In addition to circularity, the symbol has also been visually depicted as half black and half white, creating a duality that stresses interdependence rather than binary logic. With the above characteristics of circularity and duality in mind, the postmodern aspect that I analyze in Hatoum's work is its break with binary logic. First, I identify a variety of dualities extant in the novels, from language and silence to myth and reality, that instead of canceling each other out complement one another and emphasize identity's inherent ambiguity. Next, I analyze the rupture with postmodernism, which comes with Hatoum's characters' perpetual search for a more meaningful relationship with others, the environment, and themselves. As a consequence, the postmodern rootless and unstable characters give way to individuals that express more humane concerns (the recovery of the past as a value, self-reflection, and the search for familial bonds as well as for a connection with beauty and aesthetic pleasure through the arts). The symbol of the uroboro thus provides a graphic means of metaphorically representing not only the characters' identity as ambiguous and self-reflective, but also Hatoum's novels as simultaneously working within and breaking with postmodernism.

Medicine is a field of science that is always changing and promoting new ideas and innovations. Throughout history, medicine has been an important factor in the lives of people around the world since the beginning of civilizations. This study focused on the literature of medicine as it relates to the Spanish Golden Age period. By looking at the history and critical studies in medicine during sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain as well as during the pre-colonial period in America, this thesis overviews the effects and influences in regards to health and illness in Spain and the Americas during the Spanish Golden Age era.