This dissertation is a critical edition with preliminary study of a religious comedia by Jose de Valdivielso: El angel de la guarda. While his autos have been edited and have been the subject of critical study, his theater, although transcribed has not been examined critically. Critics seem to agree that Valdivielso's comedias do not compare to his autos, and that very little if any work has been done in depth The objective of this dissertation is dual: to make an accurate and annotated edition of the play, and to present a critical study of Valdivielso's style through his imagery and its usage as a tool to teach a theological lesson to the vulgo Doze autos sacramentales y dos comedias divinas, Toledo, 1622, forms the basis of this critical edition of El angel de la guarda. A copy of the text was obtained from the Hispanic Society in New York and collated with the Braga, 1624 edition in the Harvard University Library and Manuscript #15277 in the Biblioteca Nacional at Madrid. The variants of the edition of 1624 and the manuscript are included in the notes to the text The importance of El angel de la guarda, however, is not so much due to its ideological and literary merits as a play, but to Valdivielso's unique method of using imagery as a teaching tool. Through the visual magic of the stage, this imagery explains the relationship between God and man Valdivielso's strikingly unorthodox attitude toward the honor code is implicit through this comedia and has been dealt with to a certain extent by Professor Wardropper / acase@tulane.edu

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The thirteenth-century poetic dedication to Santa Oria is a vividly portrayed life of a little-known saint. Author, Gonzalo de Berceo abides by tradition in ways that the devotional poem is well-received by his public while presenting innovation which demands the attention of his contemporary audience. The Spanish poet selects a female religious subject and conforms to certain familiar motifs of female spiritual progression simultaneously exploring novel pathways. Dreams and voyages to the other world are decoratively displayed through a schematic of symbols, both bold and subtle. The artistic and picturesque quality to the poem melds elements of literary tradition to create an original voyage of a young saint, a vision and her soul. This study investigates the five visionary journeys presented in the poetic dedication to Oria. Elements of symbolism and imagery, the scripting of sanctity, with regard for female holiness, and the access to and artistic rendering of the other world are identified and located with respect to an opulent hagiographic ancestry. The Poema de Santa Oria is presented in context with other thirteenth-century mester de clerecía poems also offering visionary escapes. The Spanish-language works of shared legacy with Oria offer shades of the heavenly realm yet do not penetrate the other world locations to the extent of visionary literary precedent. The Poema de Santa Oria is positioned within an extensive tradition of hagiographic and visionary legacy descending from both art and letters. It is argued here that as a body, Oria shared language, experience and earthly spaces with her mester de clerecía contemporaries, yet the journeys of her spirit are more closely aligned with earlier literary experiences of divine destinations. Berceo's artistic style is as gentle and deliberate as the characters and landscapes he portrays. Consideration is given to the artist's exploitation of the senses which result in creation of the precious pictorial images governing narration of the saint's visionary world.

Jose Maria Merino (La Coruna 1941) is one of the most notable novelists in Spain's contemporary literary panorama. His narrative work consists, as of now, of six novels and two collections of short stories. Jose Maria Merino belongs to the second moment of the "Generation of 68" proposed by the critic Santos Sanz Villanueva, a moment characterized by the interest in storytelling and by the transgression of the imperatives of the two major novelistic tendencies existing until the middle Seventies: social realism and experimentalism. This is the first in depth study of the works of Jose Maria Merino. After reviewing the characteristics of the Spanish novel during the Seventies and Eighties, I analyze the narratives of our author using three broad areas: space, time and subject. In all of them the literary mechanisms aimed at correcting the everyday notions of those three categories stand out. With metafiction and the fantastic as predominant directions, all cases have mechanisms that favor the production of stories; be it the privileged role that the physical environments play in the genesis of the narrated events, the reflections on the plot and the plotting of lives and fictions, or the large number of "mestizos," "aindiados," "indianos" and of characters composed of dream and vigil, past and present or reality and literature. The scenes of recognition many times guide the dissolution of the subjects, who need fictions to recompose themselves as completed entities. Merino's fiction, also "mestiza," mixes elements of the classic novel with some experimentalist notions, always with the freedom of invention and the interest in storytelling as the only imperatives to be followed.

The metafictional novel is a novel that draws attention to its own form or construction and systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice, and by so doing poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In other words, the metafictional novel is such that--explicitly or implicitly, and making use of a variety of strategies and techniques--deliberately exposes the fictiveness and artifice of the literary creation. As a tendency, the metafictional novel has been part of the history of literature since the very beginnings of the novelistic genre with the publication of Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha. In the present Dissertation five Spanish novels belonging to four different periods of Spanish Literature have been selected: Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha, Benito Perez Galdos' El amigo Manso, Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla, and Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's Fragmentos de Apocalipsis and La Isla de los Jacintos Cortados. The first chapter is an introduction which refers to the most relevant theories as well as individual contributions to the study of metafiction, establishing the theoretical foundation for the individual and comparative analysis of each of the selected novels studied in the following chapters. These analyses identify the main characteristics of metafiction: its anti-realism, self-consciousness, self-referentiality or self-critical reflexion, the literary theorization within the novel, its playful nature, and the particular importance given to the role of the reader. Departing from the initial question regarding the emergence of a tendency from within the novelistic genre that includes, as part of the novel itself, the preoccupation about the essence of literature, the conclusion is that metafiction can be considered an answer to the "mystery" of literary creation and, therefore, to the interaction between reality and fiction, life and art. On the other hand, all the metafictional novels analyzed here claim, in one way or another, in a lesser or greater degree, a wide and dynamic conception of the novelistic genre and the freedom of creation and imagination.

Mário Henrique Leiria is mostly known for his short stories--- Contos do gin tonic and Novos contos do gin---published in the 1970's upon his return to Portugal from a "self-exile" in Brazil that lasted nine years. Little is known of his work composed earlier than 1973. Only some of his poems and drawings were published in anthologies of the Portuguese surrealist movement, together with other short stories. One can say "little is known" of his work in light of the considerable corpus on which the present study is based: poems, plays and short stories, but mostly poems written between 1938 and 1972. It is of utmost importance to mention that the poetic side of this author remains practically unknown to the general public. The objectives of the present dissertation are to bring to light and analyze the dated manuscripts found in the author's archives at the National Library in Lisbon. Due to the fact that Leiria contributed to the surrealist movement in Portugal, and that his surrealist period is his most prolific and aesthetically the most important in his career, this study will be divided into three parts, each of them accounting for one of the poet's three phases, with special emphasis on the second phase: "Leiria's pre-Surrealism", "Leiria's Surrealism", and "Leiria's post-Surrealism". The analysis of the poems comprising each of these phases will demonstrate that the author may be viewed as one of the representatives of literary modernity in Portugal or, more specifically, of the Portuguese vanguard.

The current study is a proposal that heads towards the vision of a polyphonic accompaniment of the evolution of allegory, journeying from a cavern, to the soul and out into the spheres of knowledge and representation. It examines the evolution of allegory from antiquity and goes deep into the study proposed by Walter Benjamin in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, allowing for the analysis that allegory falls into two fields of interpretation: first that of representation, and second that of the articulation. With its articulatory power of expression of a convention, allegory transgresses limits and spaces, becoming a tool of expression and verification of the past through the process of investigation and of research. So being, allegory, a discursive material for the laying out of the past, redirects the reader’s view towards a forgotten, ruined and decadent past that awaits its redemption and incorporation within the historicist discourse. With this in mind, I would argue that allegory in the works of Carpentier and Saramago, far from being a stylistic device seen by critics as a way of escaping censorship, is a poetics resulting from repositioning history through the displacement of what is already signified, bringing forth, as a crucial component of History the decadent, the displaced, the ruins and the marginalized. Allegory is a way of disrupting, transforming and subverting—through the very archival work carried out by both authors—, the temporal and territorial vocality of definitive histories and official languages, mythologies and the politics of inherited Manichean allegories that typify the rhetoric of nationhood and nationalism. Works such as El arpa y la sombra, Los pasos perdidos and “Viaje a la semilla” of Alejo Carpentier and Memorial do Convento, A Jangada de Pedra and A Caverna of José Saramago examine a circular vision of life and history and its discontinuities, the decadent phases of history that beg to be exposed in the decadent ruins of its reality. Allegory, in my analysis, is the means through which man and history are only saved by exposing the past, failures, and decadence from the time of the lost Paradise.

This paper explores mythical and imaginary representations of America by Boris Vian and examines the personal and social context in which they were nurtured and produced. The purpose is to contribute to an understanding of the extent and nature of the transmission of cultural values and myths between the US and France in the period between 1930 and 1955, roughly corresponding to the most productive years of Vian's life. The central texts in this discussion are those in which the American influence is most strongly present: Vian's reviews of the jazz press, written for Jazz Hot over a period of 10 years, and his four pseudo-translations of American romans noirs published under the name Vernon Sullivan, especially J'irai cracher sur vos tombes. Background discussions include Vian's childhood in the Thirties, French opinion and the U.S., the importance of American expatriates and cultural imports like the New American Novel, cinema, black American writings, American influences in other mid-century French writing, and the war-time zazou movement. The evaluation of Vian's jazz criticism involves comparisons using critical texts from Vian's French and American contemporaries as well as new critical appreciations of recorded performances which would have influenced Vian. The readings of the Sullivan novels are accomplished through a comparative look at the hardboiled American school, specifically Raymond Chandler and James Cain, both writers explicitly acknowledged by Vian to have been major influences. The paper closes with an examination of the importance of myth in evaluating both the Vian production and its American antecedents.

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Este trabalho tem como ponto de orientação a relação da Teoria do romance de Lukács com a filosofia da arte de Hegel. O confronto com Hegel se coloca como tentativa de aclarar conceitualmente as relações da obra do jovem Lukács com as suas categorias estético-filosóficas, na medida em que essas últimas apontam para o problema da arte na experiência moderna. A relação entre as duas reflexões estéticas se apresenta entrecortada pelos diálogos do autor húngaro com o círculo weberiano historicista, que evidenciam certa divergência da Teoria do Romance com os Cursos de Estética de Hegel. O trabalho busca mostrar um conflito interno à Teoria do romance entre a perspectiva histórico-dialética, que demarca a retomada por Lukács da unidade hegeliana entre forma artística e conteúdo histórico, e o uso metodológico, de inspiração antidialética, do método típico-ideal, que se constitui a partir do corte epistêmico entre os planos dos conceitos e o da realidade. Esse conflito tem como ponto de partida a divergência de Lukács acerca da valoração positiva por Hegel da experiência moderna, valoração que se articula ao diagnóstico hegeliano do fim da arte como forma de exposição da verdade moderna e sua substituição pela verdade mediada da filosofia, capaz de apresentar a liberdade moderna como experiência de totalidade figurada no Estado. Lukács, com Hegel, aponta o princípio da subjetividade como fundamento constitutivo da modernidade e do romance. O romance, contudo, em oposição a Hegel, é entendido como a exposição verdadeira da nova relação do homem com a liberdade. Isto se dá porque, segundo Lukács, o princípio constitutivo da subjetividade romanesca coincide com a experiência fragmentada do mundo moderno. A liberdade subjetiva demarca, como para Hegel, uma experiência do homem que rompe com as experiências pré-modernas. Ela permanece todavia, para Lukács, caracterizada pela fragmentação, pelo isolamento do homem em relação às estruturas sociais. A totalidade do romance, assim, é entendida, por ele como a expressão do caráter formal da busca de superação da fragmentação pelo sujeito isolado da modernidade. / This work takes as its point of orientation the relation between Lukács The Theory of the Novel and Hegel\'s philosophy of art. The confrontation with Hegel arises as an attempt to conceptually clarify the relationship of the work of the young Lukács with their aesthetic-philosophical categories to the extent that the latter point to the problem of art in modern experience. The relation between the two aesthetic reflections is presented with intersected dialogues by the hungarian author with the weberian historicist circle, which show some disagreement between The Theory of the Novel and the Aesthetics Course by Hegel. The work seeks to show an internal conflict in The Theory of the Novel between the historical-dialectic perspective, which marks the resumption from Lukács of the hegelian unity between artistic form and historical content, and the methodological use, anti-dialectical inspired, of the ideal-typical method, which is constituted from the epistemic cut between the plans and concepts of reality. This conflict has as its starting point the divergence of Lukács on the positive evaluation by Hegel of modern experience, valuation which is linked to the diagnosis of the hegelian end of art as a way of exposing the truth and its replacement by truth mediated from philosophy, able to present the modern freedom as an experience of totality figured in the State. Lukács, with Hegel, points the principle of subjectivity as a basis which constitutes modernity and the novel. The novel, however, in opposition to Hegel, is understood as the true exhibition of the new relation between man and freedom. This is because, according to Lukács, the constitutive principle of subjectivity romanesque coincides with the fragmented experience of the modern world. Freedom subjective marks, as for Hegel, a man\'s experience that disrupts the pre-modern experience. It remains, however, for Lukács, characterized by the fragmentation, by the isolation of man in relation to social structures. The totality of novel is then understood by him as the expression of the formal character in a search to overcome the fragmentation of the isolated subject of modernity.