Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 38-06, Section: A, page: 3537. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1977.

<p> The comedies of Manuel Bret&oacute;n de los Herreros in the nineteenth century Spanish Romantic literature introduced a new character with romantic and neoclassic traits. This new personality pursued an internal, heroic mission to adapt to the codes of an evolving and modern world. Bret&oacute;n de los Herreros incorporated a novel form of romantic heroism, by combining the features of the romantic hero of the tragic drama into a person of neoclassic virtues. The prior romantic hero was replaced by Bret&oacute;n&rsquo;s modern man. The goal of this Dissertation is to confirm the comedy as an effective literary style that influenced the Romantic liberal movement and announced the decay of the liberal tendency towards a more realistic literary approach in the perspective of the heroic virtues. Bret&oacute;n de los Herreros displayed four heroic styles that are related among themselves and which reflect novel literary perspectives of the new romantic character. His new hero transforms his or her former tragic nature into a personality more akin to the values of the Neoclassic movement. This new hero brings into the Nineteenth century the heroic virtues of the Illustration and thus, forces the Romantic literary movement to reevaluate the violent style as the only alternative of the hero&rsquo;s expression of his or her &lsquo;Self&rsquo;. The four romantic comedies of this Dissertation will explain the similarities and the differences among Bret&oacute;n&rsquo;s sensible heroes that coexisted with the tragic heroes. Key words: h&eacute;roe rom&aacute;ntico, comedia rom&aacute;ntica, Romanticismo, Bret&oacute;n de los Herreros</p><p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 2004. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 204 pages. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

In 1940-1941, the writer visited Haiti and became acquainted with some of its more recent literature. As a result of a special interest in modern authors and their works, five outstanding novels published in the 1931-1939 period were chosen as suitable material for this thesis. All of these novels present various phases of peasant life. This is a new trend in Haitian fiction for during the nineteenth century, writers were concerned, for the most part, with the elite. Since no other study, to the writer's knowledge, has been made on the subject of the Haitian peasant novel, it is hoped that this one will inspire others to delve deeper into the field. The Negro republic is preeminently an agricultural country, and the peasant is the backbone of the Haitian people. For that reason, the first chapter traces the background of the peasant, his educational opportunities, and his final possession of the land. A brief sketch of the development of Haitian literature is also given. Chapter II discusses the novels in general, with special emphasis on style, plot, and characters. Inasmuch as the four authors, like all Haitian writers, are totally unknown in this country, short biographies are included. Physical aspects of peasant life occupy the center of interest in Chapter III. Appearance, dress, home, food, and economic conditions are treated under this heading. Chapter IV discusses the novelists' presentation of social phases of peasant life: births, funerals, marriages, religions, superstitions, celebrations and feasts. Chapter V is a summary of the most important findings of the study. First editions of all primary sources have been used, with the exception of Mimola, by Antoine Innocent; only the second edition of this novel was available.

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The literature of the contemporary Caribbean has been often recognized for its highlighting and heterodoxy of literary form. In this dissertation, I offer a series of case-studies in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean literary aesthetics, centered on what Gordon Rohlehr, in an earlier landmark study, wryly called "The Problem of the Problem of Form." The redoubling complexity indicated by Rohlehr suggests the intricacies characteristic of Caribbean form: its inventive inscription of oral features within a textual field; its baroque interdisciplinarity and crossing of genre boundaries; its dense allusiveness and self-referentiality; and, overall, its sheer unapologetic linguistic, stylistic, and structural difficulty. Though oral and textual modalities have been treated sometimes as polarizing, viewing Caribbean writers as passionate formalists may better reflect the true integration and interdependence of orality and textuality within Caribbean writing. This conceptualization might also help to ground and clarify Caribbean writers' much-theorized, distinctive stance vis-à-vis literary modernism and postmodernism—a stance perhaps best described briefly as the merging of postmodern strategy with high-modernist mood. But finally, as my title suggests, it is an additional figurative and ideological tension within contemporary Caribbean literature, that of art/work, that is most significant to my study of Caribbean formalism. This particular paradox—artful work; the considered, constructed, and achieved "grace of effort" (Derek Walcott, "The Antilles" 81)—can be seen, I suggest, underlying the very diverse formalisms of such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Robert Antoni, David Dabydeen, Mark McMorris, and Nalo Hopkinson. This foregrounded sense of a literature wrought—not over-wrought, but wrought in the sense of artfully made, with purposefulness and intent, and with process visible—can, I think, usefully illuminate the most distinctive features of the works I examine: their unusually pronounced metaphorics and stylistics; their interactivity, staging interventions in the space that opens between text and reader; and their subtle pressing of the textual, wherever possible, toward the visual and material. Caribbean formalism ultimately emerges as formalism of an unusually dynamic, metamorphic, and transforming type: historically and politically aware, culturally relevant and effectual.

archives@tulane.edu / 1 / Dan Castilow

Doan Trouble de Fish is a collection of short stories examining the way of live for different Jamaicans in their home country and in America. The collection opens from the first-person perspective of a teenage boy struggling to understand his place amongst his group of friends in "Sat'day" and, in "'Ooman Conversation," ends with an omniscient look into the lives of a group of adult women struggling to maintain agency against the pressures of poverty. In between, we hear a boy recounting a dramatic beating from his mother, witness an encounter between a young girl and a "duppy" in the countryside, see the transformation of a man dressing in his wife's clothes to feel powerful, and are treated to guidelines on being a closeted homosexual in Jamaica. The diverse characters and points-of-view are meant to offer a tableau of what it's like to inhabit the island or to be a product of its environment. Jamaica is the unspoken character of Doan Trouble de Fish. But the more popular depictions of an island paradise are abjured in favor of urban squalor and uncompromising heat. The Jamaican environment is often harsh to the collection's characters, particularly to its women and non-masculine men. A concept underlying many of these stories is the liability of identity. A central theme to the collection is the maintenance of personal integrity in the face of an environment unwelcome to one's identity. Some characters find a way to forge ahead. Some are still trying to figure it out. / Master of Fine Arts