<p>Despite its huge mass-market appeal, the romance genre continues to be the most maligned of the pulp and mainstream fiction forms. While academic critics, whatever their degree of sympathy with readers, claim that romance serves to reinforce traditional patriarchal structures and values, other researchers claim that beneath the obvious patriarchal influences are elements that women find valuable in their lives. By studying the shift that occurred in the 1980s, and though interviewing feminists who read romance, my research seeks to understand not only the influence that the second-wave women's movement has had on the genre, but also the value that feminists place on the reading of romance fiction. If it turns out that academic critics have not kept up with the changes in romance fiction, the image of the contemporary romance reader will require significant change.</p>

This document investigates a subject apparently rather traditional, perhaps even traditionalist: the exploration of the phonological, syntactical and semantical resources by means of which French symbolist poetry acts upon the reader. This project is not, however, as strange to the current theoretical conceptions as one might believe. Derrida, Foucault, Blanchot, Kristeva, and Barthes had Mallarme in the center of their reflections on language. Indeed, a metaphysics of old platonic origins serves as the foundation of the aesthetic enterprise of symbolism. The poem becomes an epiphany: it points towards an invisible world in comparison to our physical reality, proving to be no more than a pale reflection. This ambitious project---has it failed as an aesthetic adventure or as a vision of the universe? Herewith is one of the questions that this study attempts to propose answers based on the concrete analysis of poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarme. Following the goals that I have set for myself, musical analogies will play a fundamental role in this dissertation.

<p>Despite its huge mass-market appeal, the romance genre continues to be the most maligned of the pulp and mainstream fiction forms. While academic critics, whatever their degree of sympathy with readers, claim that romance serves to reinforce traditional patriarchal structures and values, other researchers claim that beneath the obvious patriarchal influences are elements that women find valuable in their lives. By studying the shift that occurred in the 1980s, and though interviewing feminists who read romance, my research seeks to understand not only the influence that the second-wave women's movement has had on the genre, but also the value that feminists place on the reading of romance fiction. If it turns out that academic critics have not kept up with the changes in romance fiction, the image of the contemporary romance reader will require significant change.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Köngliche Universität Greifwald, 1914. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [v]-xiii).

Thesis--Bonn. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 8-24).

Thesis--Faculté des lettres de l'Université de Bâle. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis--Strassburg. / Cover title. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-64).

Cultures of Conquest argues for the recognition of a significant and vital subcategory of medieval romance that treats the crusades as one of its primary interests, beginning at the time of the First Crusade and extending through the end of the Middle Ages. Many romances, even those not explicitly located in crusades settings, evoke and transform crusades events and figures to serve the purposes of the readers, commissioners, and authors of these texts. The prevalence of crusade images and themes in romance testifies to medieval Europe's intense preoccupation with the East in its multiple manifestations, both Christian and Muslim. The introductory chapter situates the Song of Roland (c. 1100) as a hybrid epicromance text that has long set the standard for modern thinking about medieval European attitudes toward the East. The following chapters, however, complicate the Song of Roland's black-and-white portrayal of Muslims as "wrong" and Christians as "right." Chapter Two, focusing on the Middle English romances Guy of Warwick and Sir Beues of Hamtoun, demonstrates the extreme "othering" of Muslims that occurred in medieval romance; but it also acknowledges the antagonism of other Christians (whether Eastern or European) in these texts. In Chapter Three, on romances with Saracen heroes (Floire et Blancheflor, the Sowdone of Babylone, and Saladin), I show how these texts reimagine the East as a desirable ally and even incorporate Saracens into European genealogies, seeking a more conciliatory relationship between East and West than is provided by the romances discussed in the previous chapter. My fourth chapter shows how gender mediates cultural contact in Melusine and La Fille du Comte de Ponthieu: women, as the cornerstones of important crusading families, were invested in crusading and were imagined as key to the success of the crusades. The epilogue offers a brief reading of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (emphasizing the "Squire's Tale" and the "Man of Law's Tale") within a long and varied tradition of medieval crusade romance. I argue that Chaucer works to replace a literary climate that idealizes violent conflict between East and West with one that imagines the possibility and desirability of commercial relationships with the East in England's future. / text

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The thesis aims to bring together the combined knowledge and research currently available relating to Manuel Lopes and his literary production, and seeks to provide further insight into the testimony of the author Manuel Lopes and his role and purpose within the Claridade movement. The study analyses the everyday reality of the Cape Verde Islands, its people and lands, and this is compared with the author's fictional representation, the characters, the principal themes, the author's main preoccupation with his fellow islanders, his style, and his purpose of supplanting the traditional literary theme of emigration with a radically new but simple one: the option of staying on the islands. The seven chapters of this study start with a theoretical discussion introducing the history of Cape Verde, the phenomenon of emigration as a constant of everyday existence on the islands, the four major waves of this constant exodus and their causes and consequences. This is followed by a brief biographical portrait of the author and then a discussion of how his own experiences brought him to explore the facts of life on the islands and insert them into his central literary themes. The literary portrayal of these realities, setting man's great love for the land against the ambiguous call of emigration, would thus lead him to lay down the bases for a new definition of Cabo-verdianidade. This leads into a general discussion of the new Claridade generation of writers, of which Lopes was a major exponent. Chapter six presents an analysis of the work Chuva Braba focusing on the characters who influence the protagonist Mané Quim either for or against leaving, thus revealing a clear pattern whereby the main theme of emigration becomes a debate between Partir and Ficar, between an abandonment of the islands and a new sense of loyalty towards the land of their birth.