The Esope, written around 1170 by Marie de France represents not only the first literary work by a French woman fabulist, but also the first collection of fables written in the vernacular in Western Europe. Scholars have paid some attention to the sources of the first forty fables of the Esope, believed to be ultimately derived from the Romulus Nilantii, but have tended to neglect those of the second half of Marie's collection, and particularly the ones drawn from Eastern fables and folklore. While acknowledging the influence of the Latin fable tradition on the Esope, in this dissertation I put forth and provide evidence for the theory that Marie de France followed a second model: the fable tradition of Indian origin which reached Europe through the Arabs Karl Warnke's valuable essay 'Die Quellen des Esope der Marie de France', published in the year 1900 in Festgabe fur Hermann Suchier, is the only scholarly attempt to unravel the sources of Marie's fables, including the non-Aesopic ones. His work is relatively comprehensive, in that it summarizes the variants of every fable and refers to analogies and parallels, but it does not offer any in-depth analysis. Moreover, since the publication of his essay, almost a century ago, several ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Indian, Jewish, and Arabic texts have come to light, thanks to the efforts of folklorists in various parts of the world. These texts and recorded tales provide new insights into the entire domain of fable-literature, including Marie's collection In this dissertation I intend to expand upon the work of Warnke. The omission of fables outside the Greco-Latin tradition from any study of the sources of Marie's work would result in an incomplete, distorted picture and the conclusions arrived at thereby would be misleading and fallacious. A thorough investigation of Marie's sources will prove that the Esope is not only indebted to Eastern literature and folklore but also occupies a significant position in the history of the dissemination of the tales to Europe / acase@tulane.edu

With the publication by Maurice Parturier between 1941 and 1964 of the complete letters of Prosper Merimee--which number more than 5,000--a correspondence rivaling that of Voltaire in depth, beauty, wit, and especially style was revealed in its fullness. In these letters Merimee, who served both as Inspector of Historical Monuments and senator, and was an intimate of the court, observed the personages and events of the Second Empire and often expressed his feelings and judgments on them to a number of close friends. This thesis surveys his views on several important historical and political figures glimpsed or discussed in the letters, including Napoleon III; Count Alexandre Walewski; Emile Ollivier; Victor Hugo; Adolphe Thiers; Achille Fould; Charles Auguste, Duc de Morny; Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys; Eugene Rouher; Victor Fialin de Persigny and Jules Baroche. Such a survey is intended as a scholarly aid for students of his correspondence and literary works, as well as those doing research in nineteenth-century French history The study of the individual figures is preceded by a background chapter that sets forth and evaluates Merimee's political views, which are visible throughout the letters. Acquaintance with these views is essential for a proper assessment of his judgments on his contemporaries. It becomes clear, from examination of his correspondence, that he was both anticlerical and conservative; he thought the parliamentary system unsuited to France. Although he was not a creative political theorist, he did develop his own understanding of governance and in particular of the authoritarian regime that he believed suitable for his nation. He proposed notably a code of political conduct that he wanted to see followed, based on courtesy, orderliness, and fairness. He viewed such a code as pragmatic, a means of achieving stability and longevity in government. These political views did not, however, prevent him from giving perceptive and balanced appreciations of those who did not share his assumptions about government. Whether he was regaling his friends with caricatures or lamenting the fate of France in the hands of unwise statesmen, Merimee, the honnete homme, made a plea for statesmen loyal to the regime, behaving in accordance with common courtesy / acase@tulane.edu

The works studied in this dissertation have a formal concern which exhibits a textual hierarchy dominating the poetic expression: they are objective expressions in which form prevails and obscures any subjective statement. This fact separates both works from the preceding literary movements, Symbolism and Modernism, and relates them to Russian Formalism at the beginning of the XXth century. The relationship to Formalism is based on the idea that the reality of the poetic work is formed principally by language, and it is governed by internal and external functions which give it autonomy The first chapter analyses the concept of 'logos' in both books. Juan Ramon Jimenez and Alberto Caeiro abandon the notion of 'Absolute Truth' and consider the poetic work like a self-contained dynamic form which develops through rhythmic structures. This allows us to equate poetry with logos, since the former is an object with its own identity, and different from the idea of writing as copy, play, and death, which define the logocentric text The second chapter analyses the independence of the poetic work through the image of 'Nature,' as a space defined by language In the third chapter, the doubling of the poetic voice shows the rational character of both books, as it depersonalizes the text and exposes the duality that characterizes the speaking subject. The subsequent dichotomy created in both works is not metaphysical, philosophical or psychological, but is the result of the language formation process The metaliterary aspect that constitutes both texts is studied in the last chapter through their connections with Formalism, and through the analysis of the contradictions within both works, produced in the course of poetic image formation. These points reveal that Juan Ramon Jimenez's concept of 'naked poetry,' and Alberto Caeiro's 'natural expression' are related to the idea that creativity is a formal change within a literary tradition and not a subjective expression in search of a transcendental reality / acase@tulane.edu

As the XIXth Century began its last decade, several Spanish novelists of the 'Generacion del 68', displeased with the technical and ideological limitations imposed by the experimental method advocated by naturalism, introduced new ways of exploring human reality in its totality. While they still borrowed many of the techniques introduced by naturalism, these novelists searched for new ways to express those individual and social realities which lay beyond the realm of the senses and of deduction (reason). Influenced also by the growing spiritualism, characteristic of the fin de siecle mentality, these authors explored and interpreted in their novels the religious sentiment of their society. In particular they examined the question of faith, its interpretation and its concrete effects on the life of society This study examines eleven novels of Palacio Valdes, Pardo Bazan, Luis Coloma, Leopoldo Alas and Perez Galdos which, from 1890 to 1899, deal with faith and unbelief, either as the basic conflict, or as the ideology which permeates it. After an overview on faith in general, faith in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, its development in the Church and its philosophical and theological interpretations in the XIXth century, each of the novels is first presented and then its particular interpretation is compared to the theology and official pronouncements of the Catholic Church, from Vatican I and Pope Leo XIII The study illustrates that these Spanish novelists, genuinely preoccupied with the state of society, presented their views on faith according to their own orthodox and/or heterodox convictions. Each denounced abuses and suggested ways in which religious and non-religious faith can be an asset in the restoration of society's traditional values. Each offered a new vision to society at the threshold of the XXth Century / acase@tulane.edu

Charles Perrault wrote Mother Goose Tales after a very successful political career as a state officer under Louis XIV. His contemporaries pretended to believe he was trying his hand at a marginal literary genre meant for the education of his children in order to distract himself from political and court activities Reading Mother Goose Tales with Perrault's political career in mind, however, gives the tales a new historical perspective. This dissertation demonstrates that fairy tales were not a retirement distraction for Perrault, but, instead, the continuation of his function as one of Louis XIV's major political propagandists. The eleven fairy tales parallel the principles of the school of Saint-Cyr which the king opened in 1686 for young aristocratic girls. The school was meant as an instrument against a new potential Fronde and taught young girls respect for monarchical and patriarchal hierarchy as well as Christian virtue, so they would in turn reproduce and expand the same model at home. Aimed at a larger audience, Perrault's fairy tales read as a subversive reproduction of the literary genre popular among female readers and provided a similar model of domestic subordination for female aristocrats reading fairy tales in salons This political agenda was doubtless aimed at regaining the king's favor, but also served as an argument in the most debated literary quarrel of the period. Since the outburst of the Quarrel of the Books, which questioned the servile imitation of ancient works in any artistic expression, Perrault had been a fierce advocate of the Moderns' side. We will see in this dissertation that political engagement and literary creativity therefore worked hand in hand to demonstrate that contemporary production could and should surpass ancient works. Folklore and popular storylines never printed before were only a pretext for Perrault to shape a modern didactic literary writing that could address contemporary social and cultural issues, such as education, the role of women in society, and the rebirth of Christian faith, and which was to reinvent the moralistic genre for centuries to come / acase@tulane.edu

Although the phenomenon of emigration is not unknown to the Spanish experience, the recent increase of immigration in Spain over the last decades has facilitated the development of a discourse that seeks to vindicate the public space, identity and voice of the immigrant subject and his/her culture in relationship to the hegemonic discourse. This new discourse opens the door and legitimizes, in one way, the study and analysis of a perduring migratory phenomenon: the Andalusian and Murcian migration to the Catalan region. The Catalan image, identity and culture have been constructed on the basis of the presence of these supposedly foreign elements: the Xarnegos, that is, these immigrants from the South, and their so-called popular culture The narrative of the Catalan writer Juan Marse, born in 1933, recaptures, with extraordinary literary force and beauty, the dynamic that occurs when the encounter between the Catalan national subject and the Xarnego Other takes place. His novels, particularly Ultimas tardes con Teresa (1966), La oscura historia de la prima Montse (1970) and El amante bilingue (1990) are literary spaces in which we are told, by means of different stories, one single story: the history of an unequal exchange which forces us to rethink the hegemonic story Chapter I of the dissertation sets forth and, at the same time, questions the presence-absence of Juan Marse and his work, and the presence-absence of popular culture, in academia and the world of literary criticism. Chapter II analyzes the presence and the role of religious discourse in the construction of the popular as the national other. Chapter III focuses on the issue of the role of language and its complexity in the formulation of national identity. At the same time it analyzes the role of the Andalusian immigrant in this process. Chapter IV studies the presence of popular songs and music which, in the novel, El amante bilingue, become a literary narrative voice. It is through this music and song that the national Other successfully vindicates his/her subjectivity and affirms a national identity that is hybrid, mestizo and different from the hegemonic national identity discourse / acase@tulane.edu

The relationship between the works of Marie de France and ancient and medieval literary influences has been well documented in the critical literature. Few critics, however, have addressed the importance of nature, and specifically animal imagery, in the Lais. The twelfth century witnessed, in all realms of human intelligence and endeavor, an unprecedented effort to systematize knowledge and rationalize human experience. Animal imagery, a traditional form of representation, was prevalent in diverse treatments in the Bible, in the works of the ancients, in Ovid, and in the matiere de Bretagne that was so much in vogue during the time of Marie de France The present investigation proposes a critical analysis of the role of animal imagery in six lays. Depiction of animals varies throughout the lays, but one constant unites the images: they are all presented in a state of metamorphosis, either physical or profoundly symbolic transformation. Metamorphosis is intimately associated with metaphor, which is intrinsic to thought and generative of language and literature, therefore the metamorphic animal characters can be interpreted metaphorically on generic, textual and socio-cultural levels Because genre is by nature both representational and transformational, the textual metamorphic animal images are validated by Marie's choice of the lay, a flexible and evolving narrative form, as a basis for her artistic recreation of the oral Bretannic tales. Choices made by the author from the available literary, social, political and cultural paradigms of her era produce new metaphorical readings along the syntagmatic axis of metamorphic animal imagery. This transformative process becomes a literary metaphor for the medieval compositional theory of translatio studii plus inventio The dependence of metaphor upon the receiver makes the Lais especially open to re-creation, indeed co-creation, through the glosses of succeeding generations of readers who interpret the metaphors of metamorphic animal imagery in light of their own paradigmatic experience. The animal images reveal metamorphosis to be the governing metaphor of the lays / acase@tulane.edu

Pierre Grenaud's apparent conclusion in his chapter 'Que penser de l'Ecole nord-africaine des lettres?' is that no significant literary community which could be classified as such existed in the French Algeria of the 1930s and 1940s. His analysis seems to indicate that during that era the contributions made to the literary world by French Algerian writers constituted only individual efforts intended to glorify France. It can be inferred from this that the immediate influences of the Algerian environment on the pied-noir writer counted for little in either the conception of his art or his identity as a writer The object of this thesis is to re-address the question of the literary significance of colonial French Algeria, as related to the literary group known as the Ecole d'Alger. In 1936 this group formed around the editor Edmond Charlot and the writer Albert Camus, and in 1945 was considered by the French writer and critic Gabriel Audisio to constitute a literary school. Associated with this school are the four writers of interest in this thesis: Emmanuel Robles, Jean Pelegri, Jules Roy, and Albert Camus This thesis demonstrates that the Ecole d'Alger holds a notable place in recent French literary history. An examination of the writers' nostalgic literature shows their identities as both French Algerians and French Algerian writers, and serves to affirm the existence of the Ecole d'Alger The introduction to the thesis addresses the broad issue of post-independence nostalgia for Algeria. Chapter one contains a brief history of colonial French Algeria and the Algerian War. Chapter two is an overview of French Algeria's non-indigenous literary history prior to the 1930s. Chapter three presents the social climate that produced the Ecole d'Alger, while chapter four presents the Ecole d'Alger in detail. Four subsequent chapters treating the writers' nostalgic literature on Algeria analyze autobiographical novels and memoirs. In conclusion it is seen that the role and image of Algeria in all of these works affirm the writers' love for, and identification with, Algeria, and affirm their status as members of a literary community distinctive in the history of French Algeria / acase@tulane.edu

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This dissertation examines the profeminist position of Francisco Delicado in Retrato de la Lozana andaluza. In Renaissance European society the patriarchal culture promoted notions of women's inferiority and urged a life of domestic confinement and restriction from discursive participation in the social and public dimension as ideal for female respectability. Delicado makes a statement in favor of greater possibilities for women by proposing a female character, Lozana, who is free, independent, intellectually competitive and extremely verbal. His discourse resists Renaissance cultural prescriptions for women dealing with enclosure, silence and chastity, values that many European moralists and philosophers exhorted in various treatises and manuals about women's education With a grounding in the current theoretical understanding of Renaissance feminism, this dissertation presents an examination of Delicado's profeminist position in the context of what are currently described as individualist and relational models. The individualist model proposes an autonomy of women in relation to men, law and politics, while the relational explores what women are and do in contrast to men. Delicado's text offers the possibility of invoking both models simultaneously. La Lozana displays in public her capacities to undertake activities and behaviors traditionally accepted as specific to men, thereby enacting her individualist stance. At the same time, however, she evinces a reliance on the relational model through using her knowledge of food and gastronomy as a way to gain control and power. Food and eroticism are interwoven in the text with feminist issues in the sense that sensual components are recognized as pleasures to be fully enjoyed as well as the basis of women's exercise of power / acase@tulane.edu