<p> In the 19th century, writers like Chateaubriand, Nerval, and Flaubert traveled in search of sublime, exotic transport that still existed (they believed) outside of France. However, this tradition changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With the advent of a modernity defined by calculated rationalism and progress, many writers began to lament the death of travel as a sublime, writerly experience. To paraphrase Sartre&rsquo;s Roquentin, they mourned the death or dearth of adventure and enchantment left in the world.</p><p> In my dissertation, I read the travel memoirs of three authors who look for ways of overcoming this <i>disenchantment of the world:</i> the futurist and vagabond Blaise Cendrars, the surrealist ethnographer Michel Leiris, and the heteroclite traveler-poet Henri Michaux. I examine how each of these authors develops a particular method of travel that mixes poetic desire with the technological, social, and political realities of the modern world; Cendrars through a fascination with speed and vehicles, Leiris through ethnography, and Michaux through an obsession with ethical practices of self-control. Each author&rsquo;s method, I show, leads him to form what the critic Michel Deguy calls a <i>po&eacute;thique</i> &mdash; writing that finds enchantment through reason and engagement with the real world. The title of my dissertation, <i>Rational Enchantment,</i> then, describes this <i>po&eacute;thique</i> process. In other words, I show how, through travel, Cendrars, Leiris, and Michaux cultivate representations of enchantment that, in turn, contribute to the re-enchantment the world. </p><p>

Throughout her long literary career the Spanish writer Rosa Chacel (1898-) has defined and authorized her work by affiliation with male-dominated literary groups--mainly, the so-called "generation of (eighteen) ninety eight" and, most important, the Spanish avant-garde which was formed around Jose Ortega y Gasset in the twenties. Both groups' understanding of gender and of the creative capacities of women was profoundly conservative. I provide an account of Chacel's mentors--adjusting Harold Bloom's Freudian theory of literary influence to the situation of a woman writer-as a chain of misogynous fathers. The resulting family romance is described here as simultaneously anxiety-producing, productive and troublesome for Chacel, who both draws inspiration from and is compelled to subvert paternal concepts. An analysis of both Chacel's autobiographical and fictional work shows that subversion is one of the most important resources through which the writer negotiates the paradox of her affiliation with the above mentioned precursors. I provide a detailed example of the subversion of the key 'ninety-eight' concept of 'will' in Chacel's autobiography, Desde el amanecer. Similarly, I show the subversion of traditional seduction narratives which takes place in her novel Memorias de Leticia Valle. A relevant fact of Chacel's relation with her literary fathers which thus becomes apparent is that the writer negotiates her differences with her mentors on questions of gender exclusively in a textual manner. Although most of this dissertation is devoted to explaining the complexities and contradictions of Chacel's approach to femininity in terms of her relation with her literary fathers, I suggest strongly in the end that the mother also occupies a central, albeit subdued, role in Chacel's family romance. Ultimately, Chacel is revealed as a writer haunted and seduced both by father and mother, thus dwelling in a space defined by indecision, a position which I consider emblematic of the complex predicament of many women writers in patriarchy.

The transition to democracy is the most significant political event of the recent Spanish history and the episode which after the Civil War has wielded the most powerful attraction over Spanish historians and politicians. Taking into account this fact, it is curious that a phenomenon that has inspired a considerable novelistic corpus has not being studied systematically by literary criticism. This doctoral dissertation is an analysis of how four contemporary Spanish writers (Francisco Umbral, Manuel Vicent, Fé1ix de Azúa y Manuel Vázquez Montalbán) view in their novels Spains transition to democracy. I argue that these authors offer alternative narratives of the transition that disrupt and contradict the complacent and monological version elaborated by Post-Francoist historiography; a version that is, fundamentally, a mythical narrative construction. How does fiction contradict the myth of the democratic restoration? By using and abusing memory. In these novels, memory is used as an epistemic instrument to investigate the recent and unresolved political past of Spain, and rebuild a solid collective and personal identity. Taken together, the five novels of this study suggest that there is a gap between memory and history, a sharp opposition between what I call a politics of forgetting promoted by the historians and politicians, and a poetics of memory fostered by the fiction writers, which establish a dialogue with the transitiods history in order to apprehend its complexity through imagination. In this dissertation I also argue that the political transition and its fictionalization took place almost simultaneously. For the historical and literary study of these novels, I have used as primary critical instruments some ideas elaborated by the New Historicism, the Postmodernism, and Mikhail Bakhtin, among others. These practices view the issue of representation as ideological construction and reexamine the relationship between fiction and history, so important in the novels of this study. Understanding the political transition by way of its literary representations is a fruitful operation that reveals to us the essential role of memory and fiction in the elaboration of Peninsular history and identity.

Nationalism is an inherently modern ideology which empowers the claims of a community to be considered, at all effects, as a differentiated and sovereign entity. It has often found in historiography an important ally: the narration of the past allowed Nationalism both to assert the diachronical continuity of the identity it vindicates, and to construct a stable, collective subject: the people. Moreover, Romantic Nationalism offered a mythic description of the past and present of this historical subject, which was appropriated by numerous European nationalities in order to articulate their own political aspirations. Such was the case of Galicia in the 20th Century, when several intellectuals tried to stop the dissolving of her signs of identity—mainly the Galician language—by the politics of the Spanish government. This dissertation focuses on the beginnings of Modern Galician Literature. It analyzes the development of the historical novel, a literary genre which opens an immense space for the national imaginary to enter the writing of fiction. It gives nationalist writers the opportunity to inscribe the narration of the national past in their own fiction. Our main purpose is to show to what extent these historical novels appropriate the mythical narrative of Romantic Nationalism in order to construct their own national identity. We first describe the complexity of Nationalism and the strategies of 19th Century Nationalism which so strongly influenced Galician intellectuals. Then we follow a literary and ideological analysis mainly of two authors: Antonio López Ferreiro and Ramón Otero Pedrayo. We conclude that López Ferreiro conformed to a reactionary nostalgy of the Ancient Regime, and completely ignored the interpretative manners of Nationalism. By contrast, the work by Otero Pedrayo follows to the end all the premises of romantic Nationalism. However the disparity of their historical recreations, both writers have recourse of history to lament modernity and the disappearance of the old social system.

This dissertation analyzes the interplay between reality and fiction in four of Javier Marias's novels, Todas las almas, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, Negra espalda del tiempo and Fiebre y lanza, and in selections from his journalistic articles. It focuses on the antirealist elements at work, such as the melding of seriousness and humor, the incongruous mixture of history and fiction, and the unreliability of the intrusive narrator. Chapter I situates Marías in the context of the post-Franco years and chronicles his rejection of the literature of social realism and his incorporation of postmodern tendencies. Chapter II analyzes different types of humor in the aforementioned novels through the application of Bakhtin's theories of the carnivalesque, Victor Shlovosky's theory of estrangement, Geoffrey Harpham's studies on the grotesque, and Marías's own manipulation of history. Humor functions as an expression of play, an instrument of subtle criticism, a decoding challenge, and an artistic artifact. Historical figures subjected to humor include King Juan Carlos and Francisco Franco. Chapter III analyzes the juxtaposition of fact and fiction in Negra espalda del tiempo through the application of theories formulated by Phillipe Lejeune and Brian McHale. I compare Marías's biography of Wilfred Ewart, an ill-fated English writer, with those of Ewart's other biographers and with Ewart's own autobiography. In his reconstruction of Ewart's life, Marías raises questions about authorial reliability and textual stability. Drawing attention to the subjective role of the author, he makes connections between his life and Ewart's, and employs fictive devices to illuminate reality. Chapter IV examines the postmodern characteristics of Marías's journalistic essays. Marías incorporates humoristic techniques and fictive devices to make his readers aware of cultural and political change, but unlike Larra, with the absence of a national mission.

<p> During the 20th century, book historians, bibliographers, librarians, and archivists laid down the theoretical and empirical framework to understand the printed book as a commodity--a product of a specific market. In the 21st, the predominance of digital technologies and the cyberspace has made more evident than ever that print technologies created a specific market space for cultural exchange: the <i>printspace</i>. We propose <i> authorship</i> as a textual commodity, a cultural object that is shaped by the legal, commercial, and material limitations of the printing press as a platform of media communication.</p><p> Under this framework I present four study cases, analyzing different authorships associated with a specific print product, all in the context of the Spanish Golden Age. In the first case, I posit that the material characteristics of the <i>pliego suelto</i> produce a very specific kind of authorship that differs greatly from the authorship for books. Here, the works of Benito Carrasco and Crist&oacute;bal Bravo serve as an example and a probe for the market of <i>pliegos</i>. In the second case I contrast Mateo Alem&aacute;n&rsquo;s authorial project with how the readers consumed his authorial persona. This juxtaposition shows how an authorship is not the sole creation of the author, but the product of the mechanisms of production, distribution, and consumption of printed text. The third case investigates the interaction between the market of <i>comedias</i> and the market of printed books. The play <i>El Burlador de Sevilla</i> serves to illustrate how this transfer created persistent authorial problems. I demonstrate how the <i>printspace</i>, as a theoretical framework, can provide critical solutions to these authorial problems. The last chapter studies the authorships of Lope de Vega and Juan P&eacute;rez de Montalb&aacute;n as part of the editorial enterprise of the book merchant Alonso P&eacute;rez. This case exhibits the marketing strategies used in the construction of both authorships, and showcase the importance of the nascent figure of the editor in the market of books.</p><p>

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.

Esta disertacion busca, interdisciplinariamente, un material y un nuevo contexto, desde una perspectiva feminista, como base para analizar, las obras escritas por mujeres y en especifico, las de poetas espanolas del siglo XX, esperando entrar en dialogo con la tradicion poetica patristica. Asi, el Capitulo 1 sirve de marco y guia al material provisto en los capitulos siguientes.El Capitulo 2 narra procesos interdisciplinarios realizados por investigadoras feministas, quienes desde los anos 60 encuentran nuevas narraciones y diversas categorias de analisis producidas por la presencia de mujeres en la historia.El Capitulo 3 sintetiza las diversas etapas y las respectivas prioridades de la critica literaria feminista, especialmente la anglo-americana, desde sus origenes en grupos heterogeneos pro derechos civiles, hasta la organizacion de grupos exclusivamente de mujeres, a la par con la entrada de intelectuales feministas a la Academia.El Capitulo 4, es una bibliografia de 223 poetas espanolas, que presenta su incursion en otros generos literarios y la recepcion inmediata a sus obras en resenas, antologias, prologos, revistas de poesia, anuarios y textos criticos.El quinto capitulo se dedica a poetas y antologias, tanto generales como especificas, representativas del quehacer poetico en la Espana del siglo XX.El Apendice consiste de dos Cuadros antologicos. El primero incluye poetas que aparecen en antologias generales. El segundo, poetas en antologias tematicas, nacionales y/o regionales representativas. Es una nomina de 825 poetas incluidos en 75 de las antologias mas importantes que presentan y/o marginan poetas a la vez que establecen el canon, y su relacion con obras de las poetas rescatadas. Esta disertacion se cierra con una bibliografia (alfabetica y cronologica) de las antologias senaladas.Los trabajos de referencia, dedicados a las escritoras espanolas, han aumentado en los ultimos anos. En ellos, como en este, se busca fomentar el analisis de la amplia participacion de las mujeres no como fenomenos literarios aislados sino como evento que amplia la esfera separatista de cualquier proceso en el que participan las escritoras, o que la integran a un espacio mas amplio que permita ver sus obras dentro de otra nueva historia-literaria.

The basic characteristic of Postmodern times manifests itself through the dissolution of totalitarian theories. In a more complex and scattered world, postmodern thinking rejects the absolutist interpretations of Big History. This approach implies the multiplicity and acceptance of each and all perspectives that might contribute to a new dimension of a given literary work. We approach this ideology as the end of all ideologies through three critical methods that enhance the textual features as well as the internal contradictions that emerge from the text. The study of the unconscious understood as being structured as language is achieved following the parameters of French anti-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Next, Julia Kristeva's linguistic theories are used to analyze the semiotic content of Tusquets' feminine voices. Finally, the break with the Western system of thought is developed by means of Derrida's deconstructive criticism.