This dissertation analyzes the extent to which the pictorial cycle and poetic text in the Códice Rico manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X el Sabio convey the same religious and ideological messages. The Códice Rico portrays an ordered, laboring Christian society with some presence of Jews and Muslims, at the mercy of nature and human nature and saved only by the grace and intercession of Holy Mary. In this iconographic society, King Alfonso appears both as the exemplary Christian ruler and the devotee of Mary, singing her praises and exhorting others to do the same. This dual representation suggests that the pictorial cycle of his Marian project is not merely pious, but also politically motivated and forming part of Alfonso X's greater ambition, the crown of Holy Roman Emperor.

The current study contemplates the relationship between narrative structure and memory in five contemporary Spanish novels. Since the Spanish Transition to Democracy literary critics have been quick to discuss the resurgence of historical memory in narrative. In particular, there has been an abundance of work that seeks to vindicate those who supported the Second Republic during the Spanish Civil War, but whose voices were silenced upon the republic's fall to Franco's army in 1939. Nevertheless, despite the wide critical recognition of a movement to recuperate Spanish historical memory, critics have largely ignored the role played by narrative structure in the construction of said memory during the 1990's and the first decade of the 21st century. Contemplating what Hayden White calls "the content of the form" at the stylistic level as well as at the level of each novel's macrostructure, this study demonstrates that the narrative techniques utilized by Juan Marsé, Manual Rivas, Dulce Chacón, Javier Cercas and Bernardo Atxaga cast a particularly postmodern light onto the darker mnemonic shadows of the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship. Through a series of typically postmodern mechanisms, such as the use of multiple narrators, mediated texts and constant dialog between varying levels of fiction and metafiction, these narratives transcend mere historic reflection and nostalgia in order to contemplate the subjective nature of the very mnemonic processes through which they are ostensibly created. The narrative structures of the works discussed in this study emphasize the fact that objective truth cannot be attained by means of present, postmodern remembering, much less when said remembering is linguistically mediated through narration. Thus, rather than seeking in vain to recuperate an unascertainable historical truth, these authors create highly structured, though purely esthetic, fictional representations of history, representations whose narrative forms are a prescription for the epistemic ills of the disillusioned, fragmented and uprooted postmodern implicit reader.

Considering Os Grão-Capitães: uma sequência de contos by Jorge de Sena belongs to a literary genre not well studied, led to my motivation to research the elements that make this collection a short story sequence. Sena’s book is, as far as I am aware, the only Portuguese language book titled by its author as a “short story sequence.” Consequently, the present study aims to discuss the theoretical principles of this genre, as well as the structural and thematic elements that render this volume as an integrated collection. Jorge de Sena’s book utilizes various aesthetic elements that enable its conceptualization as an integrated collection of short stories. In this context, I study Sena’s book as a paradigm of the short story sequence genre and analyze the elements of paratextuality, with carceral and desolation imagery within the Estado Novo society, which integrate the different, yet interconnected, stories into one organic whole. Thus, I study how the nine stories comprising this book explore plots that complement each other and provide the collection with a narrative integrity that only the “short story sequence” genre allows.

This dissertation explores the construction and transmission of the concept of authorship in the Italian novella in late-medieval and early modern Italy and England. The notion of authorship during this period undergoes an important shift from medieval conceptions of auctoritas to modern ideas about the role of the author. Tracing the figure of the author through a single genre allows an investigation of the translational mechanisms that affect cross-cultural ideas such as authorship as they move between cultures. This research contributes to knowledge about the formation and translation of cross-cultural concepts as well as to understandings of the role of the author in early modern literature. The literature used to pursue this investigation consists of some of the major and minor works in the genre of the Italian novella in Italy and England. The first chapter establishes the generic and theoretical foundations of both the genre of the Italian novella and medieval ideas about authorship. The first text addressed is the late thirteenth-century anonymous Italian Novellino, which is included in the first chapter as an example of an early novella collection that has some but not all of the characteristics of the developing genre. The subject of the second chapter is the authorial construction of Giovanni Boccaccio in the Decameron, which forms the basis for subsequent research. The third chapter explores how later Italian writers including Francesco Petrarca, Masuccio Salernitano, Matteo Bandello, and Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio modify and expand the Boccaccian models of authorship in their own contributions to the genre. In chapter four, translation comes to the forefront in an examination of how English writers and translators worked with the Italian genre, adapting it for their own purposes. This exploration moves from the work of Geoffrey Chaucer through the major novella collections of the late sixteenth-century and ultimately to the beginnings of "original" English novella production with George Gascoigne and the continuation of the translation tradition with the first complete English translation of Boccaccio's Decameron in 1620. Finally, the fifth chapter unifies a discussion of narrative structure that has proved key in the preceding chapters, exploring how the repetition and recursivity of the texts at hand influences authorial and interpretive constructions.

This dissertation studies the politics of collective identity in the essays of Jesús Colón, Julia Álvarez and Richard Rodriguez. Through their essays I study the different configurations of collective identity (mainly those of Latino people, minorities, diasporic, transnational and national subjects) that these writes evaluate from their social position in the United States. A review of their works reveals important aspects about the problem of identity of a first and second generation of Latinos who try to understand themselves as part of the heterogeneous community in the United States. These three writers focus on the malleability of identity and use it to understand different ideologies and values. In his essays Colón highlights the reality of a subject that is economically marginalized by the historical process of capitalism. In addition, he advocates for the union of transnational workers of the Puerto Rican Diaspora in New York, who face stratification and social isolation. In contrast, Álvarez explores the construction of a diasporic identity that relies on history and on transnationalism. This author places emphasis on her writing as a nation, as a means to reflect and re-write the Dominican transnational identity. Rodriguez, the third essayist I study in this research, promotes the foundation of an American identity and evaluates the ways in which it is obstructed by the practices of communities that identify as minority. The objective of my research is to analyze the development of Latino identity using the models that these authors explore. I rely on their ideas and techniques to study the complicated and conflicting process of the evolution of a collective identity. Throughout the 20th century, these authors developed their own approach to the ideological fragmentation and mestizaje emphasized by postcolonial thought. This fragmentation influences their interpretation of history, ethnic/racial identity, family, language, education, cultural hybridity, representation and nationalism.

Since antiquity western texts have employed representations of consumption to articulate questions of desire and power. Images of eating and drinking serve not only to structure texts but also to question and subvert institutional practices, traditional dichotomies of value, and discourse itself. The primacy of desire is illustrated by a conflation with power that results in a textuality marked by excess. Its two poles are represented by cannibalism and a total refusal to eat; both are forms of absolute desire. Texts dealing with consumption are varied. Theoretical discourse such as Rumohr's Geist der Kochkunst or Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du gout disrupts traditional notions of genre by equating consumption with discourse. Polysemy and a state of constant metamorphosis are common characteristics of literary texts that concentrate on consumption. Although no unbroken development can be affirmed, earlier works such as Petronius's Satyricon or the Bible emphasize a transcendental aim, while modern ones such as Ror Wolf's Fortsetzung des Berichts stress indeterminacy and the overwhelming presence of death.

melodram

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In Harlequin Presents, the recurrence of particular moments of resistance suggests that these structures of events have meaning apart from -and perhaps even antithetical to - the ideological outcome of any specific text. The ideological structures presented in the romance novel are not passively accepted, nor do they simply fulfill a single pre-existing need or desire in their reading public. Romance novels utilize ideologies in a self-consciously playful and ironic way. These texts offer multiple ways of understanding the worlds they depict, the structures of understanding contained within being posited and discarded. This thesis proposes a means of interpreting the romance novel captures the ambivalence of the reading experience. I will show how the paradox of the romance novel - the seemingly limitless potential of a feminine discourse of the private sphere that is set within the conservative confines of repetitive narratives of social integration - is incorporated into the structure of the texts themselves. While the texts in the series manifest standardized outcomes, they also exhibit recurrent patterns of resistance. The serial form of Harlequin Presents dictates that this tension between separate value sets and ideologies is never fully resolved. The appeal of the romance novel must then lie between these competing demands. Each of my chapters examines the ways that this ironic tension functions within a different intellectual space. In considering how the domestic sphere, the body and the nation are overlayed with multiple, contested meanings, this thesis maps out the scope of ideological resistance and adherence throughout Harlequin Presents. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)