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This thesis is based on a study of the basic concepts of Concha Espina de Serna as revealed through the outstanding characters in ten of her novels and five volumes of short stories: Despertar para morir(1910), Agua de nieve (1911), La esfinge maragata(1914), La rosa de los vientos (1916), Ruecas de marfil(1917), El metal de los muertos (1920), Dulce Nombre(1921), El cáliz rojo(1923), Tierras del Aquilón (1924), El príncipe del cantar(1929?), Altar mayor (1926), Llama de cera(1927), La virgen prudente(1929), Candelabro(1933), and. La floor de ayer(1934).

El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha sits at the crossroads of two defined Spanish early modern contexts, combining Renaissance ideals with Baroque elements into one Golden Age masterpiece. The theme of duality present throughout the work finds true expression in Cervantes’ well-educated protagonist, Alonso Quijano. In him, the reader glimpses the struggle between antiquity versus early modernity, ideality versus reality, instability versus sanity, and unhealthiness versus healthiness. These medical themes and the underlying sociocultural facets will be investigated by thoroughly evaluating Cervantes’ treatment of human consciousness. In doing so, this study aims to explore the following questions: to what extent does Cervantes present relevant medical knowledge applicable to the Renaissance and Baroque periods of Spanish history? How do these medical allusions and references influence the reader’s perception of Don Quixote as insane? Could/Would a medical diagnosis of some neurologically or psychologically based disorder be applied? Finally, to what extent of the protagonist’s behavior may be medically attributed and to what extent may be the result of sociocultural disconnection? Following an in-depth review of Spanish literature and medical knowledge, it will be necessary to examine the work for episodes in which Don Quixote experiences pronounced fatigue, forgetting spells, head trauma, sleep disturbances, and headaches. This psychoanalytical process of interpreting Spanish medicine through the lens of literature illuminates the scientific background inherent in the novel and establishes a foundation for uncovering the connections between medicine, culture, and literature in Golden Age Spain.

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Thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universität, Berlin, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is a comparative literary study which is conducted by placing the reception of Russian literature in Spain during the period 1918-36 within the context of the interplay of literature and the social and political situations in which it is written. It first places the boom in the publication of Russian literature in the late 1920s and 1930s within the context of the history of the reception of Russian literature in Spain, providing a comprehensive survey of that history. Next, it describes the impact of the Russian Revolution and the formative years of the Soviet Socialist state on the political situation in pre-Civil War Spain, including the ideological links between the political situations of both countries. In pre-Civil War Spain, the revolutionary atmosphere changed the mood, subject matter and style of literature, and certain writers, recognizing their civic duty, began to produce literature that had a socially critical and didactic role. During that period, given the political context and the development of politically committed literature, Spanish intellectuals and artists of a Marxist persuasion derived incentive from their Russian counterparts. Russian literature has traditionally been the forum for social criticism, and has had a profoundly revolutionary dimension. Pre-revolutionary writers such as Dostoevsky and Andreev have been perceived by outsiders as revolutionary writers, and, in that capacity, have enjoyed great popularity abroad, including Spain. In the Soviet era, Mayakovsky was often considered to be the "Poet of the Revolution", and Gorky was the chief spokesman in the promotion of socialist ideals in literature in the twenty years following the Revolution. In Spanish pre-Civil War fiction, both the social novel and poetry were instrumental in conveying overtly Marxist messages. The thesis concludes with a comprehensive study about certain Spanish writers and their works, in the domains of poetry and the novel, specifically seeking evidence of the impact of the literature and ideology which was emanating from Russia in the first third of the twentieth century.

The Sephardic ballad collection contains ballads of varying themes, many of which have been forgotten in Spain, where they were originally sung by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. A popular theme within this genre is that of women committing adultery and transgressions which in many of the ballads is punishable by death. A brief history of the Sephardic Jews and their literary and oral tradition is included. An emphasis is placed on women's role in ballad tradition and the importance of transculturation and mimesis within the oral tradition, both significant to the survival of a tradition that has been continued for over five centuries, encompassing various regions around the world. The analysis focuses on two ballads in particular ; the "Celestine Romance", which shares a similar plot to La Celestina, written by Fernando de Rojas, and the ballad of "The Adulteress", a popular ballad within several traditions. / by Inbal Mazar. / Abstract in English. / Signature page unsigned. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2008. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This thesis argues that the popularity of the clandestine marriage plot in English and Spanish drama following the Reformation corresponds closely to developments and emerging conflicts in European matrimonial law. My title, ‘casos de honra,' or ‘honour cases', unites law and drama in a way that captures this argument. Taken from the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega's El arte nuevo (1609), a treatise on his dramatic practice, the phrase has been understood as a description of the honour plots so common in Spanish Golden Age drama, but ‘casos' [cases] has a further, and related, legal meaning. Casos de honra are cases touching honour, whether portrayed on stage or at law, a European rather than a strictly Spanish phenomenon, and clandestine marriages are one such example. I trace the genealogy of three casos de honra from their recognisable origins in Italian novelle, through Italian, French, Spanish, and English adaptations, until their final early modern manifestations on the English and Spanish stage. Their seeming differences, and often radical divergences in plot can be explained with reference to their distinct, but related, legal concerns.

Analyzing cookbooks, gastronomic guides, literature and film, this dissertationoutlines the creation of a Spanish national cuisine. Studying the works of Carmen de Burgos, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Dionisio Pérez, Ana María Herrera, Juan Mari Arzak and Ferrán Adrià among others, the project examines the evolution of this nationalist discourse by identifying common and recurring themes in an effort to extrapolate and describe the historical and cultural evolution of food from 1900 to the present day. Within the framework of Food and Cultural Studies, this project treats cookbooks, culinary manifestos and guidebooks as texts. Influenced by a variety of culinary and gastronomic of critics such as Roland Barthes, Arjun Appadurai, Benedict Anderson, Stanley Mintz and others, this dissertation analyzes nationalism through the perspective of gastronomy as a cultural practice that contributes to individual and collective identity building. This dissertation concludes that Spanish national cuisine has been defined as a unique, pluralistic blend of regional cuisines since the early twentieth century. While early authors such as Pardo Bazán admit to heavy French influence and the centralized hegemony of Madrid due to its privileged status as economic and political capital of Spain, most subsequent authors acknowledge that Spanish national cuisine is a construction of various regional influences and by the 1960s, this regional view of national cuisine is universally accepted. Shaped during the twentieth century by civil war, Francoism and globalization, Spanish cuisine today continues to be a blend of regional cuisines that mutually influence each other while also exhibiting the effects of a globalized world by incorporating non-Spanish ingredients and techniques into nationally accepted dishes.

This dissertation adds to the discussion of historical memory in Spain regarding the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship by examining three texts published between 2000 and 2004: Las esquinas del aire: En busca de Ana María Martínez Sagi (2000) by Juan Manuel de Prada; Soldados de Salamina (2001) by Javier Cercas; and El vano ayer (2004) by Isaac Rosa. I argue that these texts exemplify a unique tendency in the literature of historical memory that articulates the act of remembering through new narrative and ethical postures born of what I term journalistic affect. This dissertation identifies the tendency beginning in the early 2000s for fiction to articulate the act of remembering through the compilation and examination of truth objects. Not only do the truth objects shape the narrative of these novels, endowing the act of remembering with real-world consequences, but also the truths are embodied in objects thereby locating them outside the framework of contestable speech acts. Moreover, the search for and collection of these objects operate within a journalistic epistemological framework in that the authors or protagonists use the truth(s) embodied in one object to locate another, resulting in the act of assembling a constellation of embodied truths and the shaping of a more holistic understanding of the individual that is the aim of the search. The protagonists in these novels have to search for the modernizing discourses that never took root in a Francoist Spain that never entirely faded away, never had an overt counter-revolution, and never proved itself completely criminal on the public stage the way other nationalist dictatorships in Europe and Latin America had. They show us a Spain that has to catch up with discourses about ethnicity, gender (homosexuality), rural/urban spaces in modernization, and an historical iconography for nationhood that had not essentially been renovated since the mid 1960s. As such, the individuals in these works see an inherent lack in the Europeanized Spain that has been culturally colonized by the continent, a situation that engenders a need to reevaluate a national subject position largely frozen since 1939. / text