In this study we examine the origins, development and distribution (popularity) of emblem books throughout western Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Inherent in such a study is the clarification of the differences between and relationships among emblems, empresas, epigrams and conceits. After a brief review of pertinent traditional and modern criticism on Gongora, we study nine sonnets, a "cancion," the Soledad primera and the Polifemo for emblematic allusions and/or content. All of these works seem to have emblematic allusions; however, many (at least six sonnets, the "cancion" and the beginning of the Soledad primera) are shown to be what we shall call "emblemorphic poems," i.e., poems that are based on specific emblems (one from Cesare Ripa and the others from Andreas Alciati) and then "metamorphosed" into unique, Gongoristic poems. By combining classical mythology, emblematic conceits and autobiographical material, Gongora uses a variety of literary techniques (formulae of elocution, latinization of the lexical and syntactical units, hyperbaton, hyperbole, etc.) to create his own personalized "emblems" or emblemorphic poems. Based upon these findings, we propose at least nine more sonnets as possible emblemorphic sonnets which for a variety of reasons (themes, allusions, "architecture" (form), etc.) would lend themselves to this sort of analysis. We also suggest that the Soledades, the Polifemo and other "major" works be studied "in the light of the emblem." Thus, it can be concluded that Luis de Gongora was, like many of his contemporaries, greatly influenced by the existent emblem literature of his time and, in fact, was one of the more active proponents of crafting these curious visual and conceptual images into his own repertoire of poetic materials and techniques. This then confirms the title of our study and the appropriateness of the label we apply to this complex baroque poet, "Gongora emblematico."

One of the questions at stake in contemporary theoretical debates over the legacy of the Enlightenment is whether the political violence that has been carried out over the last two centuries is inextricably linked to the rationalist values promoted by the Enlightenment. This critique of the political and social legacy of the Enlightenment challenges us to consider how Montesquieu's writings may inform our understanding of the disintegration and formation of social-political bonds and identities. Drawing on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, this dissertation explores how Julia Kristeva's theory of the "demarcating imperative" of abjection illuminates both her claim for the critical significance of Montesquieu's Persian Letters and her argument for a cosmopolitanism based on an "ethics of psychoanalysis." The chapters that follow examine how the differences that produce the meaning of the subject and the symbolic order in the text—nature and culture; the pure and the impure; man and woman; human and nonhuman; violence and nonviolence; life and death—are articulated in relation to the figuration of the abject. Chapter one begins an exploration of two movements of the epistolary journey of the fictional foreigner. During one movement of the epistolary journey, the production of critical knowledge has the effect of destabilizing the subject and the symbolic order. In a second movement, the articulation of knowledge functions to contain the uncanny strangeness of the enlightened subject. Through a reading of the myth of the Troglodytes and the story of Apheridon, chapter two addresses how the signification of violence functions in the production and destruction of a symbolic order and how monetary exchanges offer the abject cosmopolitan an imaginary refuge from violent nondifferentiation. Chapter three begins with an analysis of how rhetorical figures operate in the epistolary exchanges to both produce the meaning of the symbolic order of France and signify a crisis of political signification. This examination of how signifying practices function as sacrificial rites presents the paradox that the Persian Letters both allows for a critical analysis of abjection and participates in the demarcation of a symbolic order that functions to deny consciousness of our uncanny strangeness.

Emmanuel Levinas claimed that the subject is not a self-positing entity. This dissertation shows that the relational dimension of the subject is reflected in the literature of exile by analyzing the works of three authors who were forced to flee Spain after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939): Luis Cernuda, Pedro Garfias and Federica Montseny. Without dismissing the historical, political and aesthetical dimensions of exile literature, this study proposes to focus on its ethical dimension, which makes writing in exile primordially a responsible act. Self-writing in exile is constituted by the urge to establish a dialogue with unreachable addressees, be them the future generations, the citizens of the new countries or even the victims of the war. Affected by the loss of an immediate addressee, the poems of Luis Cernuda in exile are informed by an urgent sense of responsibility towards the future generations of Spaniards. Aware of the irreducible distance to his addressees, Cernuda offers his works as an acknowledgment of their difference, rather than as an attempt to reduce it. Likewise, having the victims of the Spanish Civil War as its ultimate addressees, the poetry of Pedro Garfias reflects his search for a more profound and rich encounter with the Other. In works like Primavera en Eaton Hastings the poetry questions the limit of the poetic task itself. The comparative analysis of the personal narratives of Federica Montseny provides a rich opportunity to explore the peculiarities of the voice in exile. The study of the sources that Montseny uses to write Mis primeros cuarenta años (1987) reveals that the ethical dimension of the autobiographical voice is far more intense in exile than in post-exile.

This study investigates the correlations between information structure and syntactic structure with particular reference to Spanish. After a detailed consideration of notions like "topic" and "focus" and several topicalizing and focusing mechanisms (such as Clitic left-dislocation, Pronominal left-dislocation, Topicalization, Right-dislocation and Focus Preposing), two different "topical" elements are distinguished: Sentence Topic (STopic) and Background. These elements do not co-occur and each of them combines with Focus to form two different articulations: STopic-Focus and Background-Focus. The STopic-Focus articulation is pragmatically, syntactically and phonologically unmarked both in English and Spanish. It can be uttered out-of-the-blue, it involves a preverbal subject, and it is expressed through unmarked rightmost focus-related accent. However, the Background-Focus articulation, which has very specific contextual restrictions, is marked syntactically in Spanish (by the left- or right-dislocation of Background elements) and phonologically in English (by non-rightmost marked focus-related accent). From this point of view, information structure is closely correlated with syntactic structure in Spanish: STopics occupy a preverbal specifier position while Background elements occupy dislocated positions. This informational-syntactic correlation is accounted for as follows. So-called NP-movement is viewed as a topic-driven movement, which explains the contrast between topical preverbal subjects and focal postverbal subjects: only subjects with a Topic feature (an optional D feature) raise to the preverbal specifier position. The dislocated position of Background elements has to do with escaping the domain of projection of the focus feature. This explains the otherwise mysterious contrast between ungrammatical Bare Noun (BN) preverbal subjects and grammatical BN dislocated phrases (both considered to be topics up to now). BNs cannot reach the preverbal subject position, since this is a position only reached by DPs with a topic feature. However, they are allowed in adjoined, dislocated positions, since these positions can be occupied by any type and number of Background elements. Thus, some of the differences between Spanish and English arise from the fact that the topic and focus features are syntactically active in Spanish, but only phonologically active in English.

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.

One of the most prolific writers in contemporary Portuguese literature, Jorge de Sena is the author of extensive epistolographic writings. Seven books of correspondence have been published, while ten others are in press. This dissertation focuses on the place of epistolography in Jorge de Sena's literary corpus. The author believes that no literary form is less important than another. Every single text plays a role in the author's creative universe. The letters, as products of Sena's creativity as a writer, might be thought of as representing leitmotivs of his poetry and fiction. The act of writing resonates with the poet's mission of actively witnessing the pilgrimage of humankind. A prominent modern humanist among contemporary writers, Jorge de Sena authored an epistolographic oeuvre whose classic structure and form connote the ultimate purpose of the written text—one that signifies the struggle of humanity in its metamorphic journey towards a “paradise” lost and regained in and by each and every human being. The first chapter of the dissertation describes and explains the main topics of the correspondence of Jorge de Sena. This introductory part of the study constitutes a justification and explanation of the maps and charts contained in the appendices. The second chapter constitutes a critical approach to the aesthetics of the letters written by the author. The issues herein discussed bring us to the conclusion that Jorge de Sena, following the traditional model of letter writing, draws from its classic meanings into a contemporary significance of epistolography: the letter serves as a vehicle to a more in-depth reading of a writer's other literary works. The third chapter studies the letter as an important element of the author's humanistic poetics. A letter is primarily a carrier of a specific message to an individualized reader. In a broader literary context, however, the letter expands its meaning, and becomes a component, with the other written works, of the very own purpose of poetry, that is, to be an active witness of the human journey in this earthly reality. The chapter concludes with the analysis of the letters between Jorge de Sena and his wife, Mécia de Sena. This particular book of correspondence, bearing the meaningful subtitle “(Cartas de Amor)”, illustrates the author's fundamental beliefs that love and happiness are the utmost goals of humankind; and that art—and more specifically poetry (in verse and prose)—is a testament to our struggle to reach those goals. The fourth chapter discusses the role played by the correspondence in the emergence of the theme of exile in most of the author's works of fiction and poetry. The letters of Jorge de Sena, who considers himself to be an emigrant in a “voluntary exile”, are to be considered a key element of the metaphor of exile inherent in the very act of writing. The correspondence of Jorge de Sena belongs by nature to his literary corpus for it amplifies the meaning and the message of his other works. By expanding meaning and message, the epistolography becomes one more privileged space constantly “infected” by the humanistic nature of Jorge de Sena's poetics.

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