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.

Two paradoxical elements in Camus's work, both kept at a distance by the author, are the feminine and the sacred. The feminine is paradoxical in its patterns of speech and silence, and of partial or aspectual absence and presence. Whereas feminine speech and presence are abundant in Camus's theatre, absence, silence and fragmentation of the feminine characterize his narrative works, with the exception of the short story, "La femme adultere." The sense of the sacred, which permeates Camus's work, represents a philosophical paradox. Indeed, how to reconcile Camus's agnosticism and his philosophy of the absurd, which denies transcendance, with this sense of the sacred? How to explain the experience of "La femme adultere"? For it is in this text, after having intersected in the plays, that the paradoxes of the sacred and the feminine climactically come together and approach the metaphysical. A first critical approach sets the sacred in the context of Camus's time. Juxtaposing the early Camusian essays with certain writings of contemporary authors relative to religion and the sacred, it considers the sacred from philosophical, historical and sociological as well as religious perspectives. A second approach, psychoanalytic and feminist, explores Camus's narrative works and his drama. Referring mainly to the writings of Kristeva and taking up her notion of the "myth of the feminine" as the "last refuge of the sacred", it examines the absences and silences of the mother in the narrative works before concerning itself with the speech and presence of the female companion in the plays. This difference between the two genres is analyzed. Finally, the last part of the thesis, which focuses on "La femme adultere", examines the modalities of desire. It is this context of desire, linked to the Camusian concept of the absurd, that opens the feminine to the sacred. This double paradox is examined along with the possible meaning of the unexpected alliance of the feminine and the sacred in a corpus of work mostly perceived as masculine and agnostic.

The main purpose of the present research is to develop a critical reading of the double identity such as it is expressed in the novels of the North African immigrants living in France. But, and far from proposing another socio-historical analysis on North African immigration in France, the interest of this work is in filling the surprising lack of critical literary works on the subject. It is based on the concept of the wandering, which forms the imaginary identity of the "Beurs". This perspective reactivates older debates about the significance of "us", "the other", the races, the Nation-State and the nature and limit of the concept of national culture. It will also allow us to present some of the main characteristics of the Beurs's identity, and from there, will help us to redefine the myth of the modern stranger. The thesis of this research proposes that the Beurs's identity is mainly built through denunciation and subversion of the Nation State's official discourse and finally produces an original formulation. From the study of the themes, the form the way the story is told, and from the subversive character of the discourse about otherness (which refuses the idea of unity and wholeness that the French national culture is still pushing forward today), this paper shows, finally, how this new discourse on one's identity (coming from the world of the North African immigration, but from within the occidental world), could very well be a modern inversion of the concept of Orientalism. The novelty, which for us is capable of renewing the way the Western world looks at the Stranger, is that the latter is at once subject and object of the discourse, and that this neo-orientalism is itself a production of the western world, with the clear intent of ruining it.

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This study of the "prosaics" of allegory in Perez Galdos's novels examines the relationship between allegory at its most formally elemental and prose realism at its most complex. The first chapter introduces the major lines of philosophical, rhetorical, hermeneutic, and deconstructionist thinking in modern approaches to allegory, from the Romantics to Paul de Man, and illustrates various ways in which allegory's formal structures serve as the figural and morphological underwriters of Galdos's narrative fictions. Chapter II uses a single tropological occasion in Galdos's Miau to develop a realist's revisionistic equation, in which the authoritative and morphologically deterministic structures of typology are compounded by modern intertextuality and the figural structures of metonymy and metaphor. Dante's Inferno supplies the allegorical subtext for the tropological occasion in question, and in that fashion is introduced the master allegorist whose authoritative traces will serve as allegorical tracking points in each of the study's subsequent chapters. Nicolai Gogol and Charles Dickens provide control texts by which to gauge the innovative subtlety with which Galdos articulates his stylistic equation. Chapter III explores the role of personification allegory in construing a metaphysics of fictional character. Galdos's dialogue novel Realidad, Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, Prudentius's Psychomachia, and Dante's Inferno provide opportunities for speculation about about reductivity and complexity in realistic characterization. The fourth chapter takes Galdos's Torquemada tetralogy as the basis for comment upon realistic fictions as allegories of epochal thinking. Michel Foucault's concept of the "episteme" opens the way for a discussion of the epochal disjunction in that novel series between Comtian positivism and Dantean allegory--a disjunction between system and synthesis. The fifth and final chapter draws upon allegory to propose a theory of the management of narrative time in realism. The theory suggests allegory as the underwriter of several narrative time codes that work against the impulse of chronology in prose narrative. Galdos's short novel Tristana is considered as an allegory of time--historical time, time detained, and time passing. Dante's tale of Paolo and Francesca, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, offers examples of Galdos's deployment of the time codes under consideration.