This dissertation, Emancipated Peripheries. Politics of Spatial Representation in the Re-imagined Iberia, explores how the emergence of Basque, Galician and Asturian literatures has changed the web of relations between these literatures and the other consolidated Iberian literatures (Castilian, Portuguese, and Catalan), and how the coexistence of these literatures in the Iberian Peninsula forces us to re-conceptualize Iberian space as the place where the identity of a certain linguistic community is performed, understanding space in a performative way. This dissertation questions two predominant assumptions: first, that peripheral literatures are nothing but small imitations of national literatures, and that they follow the same paradigm at a minor scale, with minor achievements which are significant only in their own context. Second, that there is a centripetal center towards which every cultural movement tends to refer. I argue that peripheral Iberian literatures establish themselves as new interconnected centers of cultural production that are no longer dependent, but rather are inter-dependent, transforming the periphery into a privileged place for renovation and the formulation of new cultural proposals and tendencies. This reading of the Iberian context also invites a new reading of the Castilian canon, unearthing hidden masterpieces and alternative readings of the tradition. A post-colonial, ecocritical and biopolitical approach to these issues allows an in-depth understanding of what has been hidden: alternative conceptions of modernity, dissimilar readings of the literary canon, and the strong and concealed voices of the peripheral, the women, or the rural. This dissertation examines how peripheral literatures (and among these I include a certain reading of the Castilian tradition) redefine the relation between the human and non-human, masculine and feminine, nature and culture (focusing on the poetry of the Galician poet Olga Novo); how they draw new symbolic maps of the Iberian literatures and their traditions (as the Asturian writer Xuan Bello does); how they recover the lost memory of certain communities (studying novels by Basque writer Iñigo Aranbarri and the Castilian novelist Julio Llamazares, as well as video installations by artists like Barbara Fluxá or Iván Cortázar); and how certain literary works propose a new web of relations between peripheries (analyzing the novels by the Portuguese writer Valter Hugo Mãe).

Les interactions entre transport et territoire sont l’objet d’une littérature scientifique permanente, questionnant les impacts économiques et démographiques d’une nouvelle infrastructure, souvent évoqués à l’échelle d’un projet. L’objectif de la thèse est de réinvestir les composantes de l’interaction par les larges échelles spatiales et temporelles, en posant l’hypothèse que la profondeur temporelle et l’échelle du territoire national sont porteuses de nouvelles explications. Ce travail s’appuie sur la collecte, l’exploitation et l’analyse de la large base de données FRANcE (French RAilway NEtwork), qui recense chaque section du réseau ferroviaire français depuis le début du XIXème siècle et les recensements démographiques. Cette base renferme également les traces de la vitesse, qui constituent une information inédite sur l’ensemble du réseau et qui permet de faire de l’accessibilité une variable décisive dans les explications. Plutôt que de se concentrer sur l’acquisition de nouvelles données au prix d’une lourde collecte, nous misons sur la construction d’un appareil méthodologique pour étudier les deux sens de l’interaction entre réseau et territoire, qui requiert toutefois une adaptation des dispositifs de structuration des données et d’analyse. La démarche de la thèse consiste en une modélisation croissante du phénomène, de la compréhension et la formalisation des objets jusqu’à la formalisation des données et des analyses, ce qui nécessite le recours à d’autres disciplines. Ce travail utilise le formalisme des graphes pour investiguer les deux sens de la relation. Il aide à étudier l’effet du réseau à partir d’une diversification de la donnée et de sa modélisation pour rendre compte de portées spatiales et temporelles. Il aide à étudier l’impact d’une structure préexistante dans la morphogénèse du réseau ferroviaire français à partir d’un modèle d’évolution endogène, entre diffusion du rail et hiérarchisation des infrastructures. Ce travail vise à mieux comprendre les liens qui unissent réseau et territoire, dont les outils méthodologiques peuvent être appliquées à d’autres réseaux, d’autres temporalités, jusqu’à des problématiques actuelles. / The interaction between space and network are frequently questioned in the academic literature, by asking the economical and demographical impacts of a new infrastructure, often studied at the scale of a project. This work aims to investigate the components of the interaction in both large spatial and temporal scales. The hypothesis is that the temporal depth and the national scale could bring new explanations. This work is based on the collect, the exploitation and the analysis of the large spatio-temporal database FRANcE (French Railway Network). It identifies all sections of the network since the 19th century and the population census. This database also contains the traces of the speed, which are novel information for network, and allows the accessibility to become a decisive variable in the explanations. Rather than acquisition new data with an intensive phase of collect, we aim to build a methodological chain to study the two senses of interaction between space and network. It requires the adaptation of data structuration and analysis. The approach of this thesis consists on the growing modelling of the phenomenon, from the comprehension to formalization of data to the analysis, which requires the use of other disciplines. This work uses the graph theory to investigate the two senses of the relationship. It permits to study the network effect in the long run by diversifying the data to identify spatial and temporal ranges. It permits to study the impact of a pre-existing structure in the morphogenesis of the network, by using a dynamic model of network evolution, between diffusion and hierarchical organization. This work aims to understand the link between space and network, where the methodological tools can be adapted to other networks, other times and actual questioning.

This thesis examines and compares two travel accounts in the regions of Phocis and Boeotia in Greece, as they appear in the book of Sir William Gell “The Itinerary of Greece: With a Commentary on Pausanias and Strabo and an Account of the Monuments of Antiquity at Present Existing in that Country (1819) and on the two volumed book of Edward Dodwell A Classical and Topographical Tour Through Greece: During the Years 1801, 1805, and 1806, Volume 1 & 11 (1819). More specifically, the thesis explores the extent of the area that these travelers managed to cover during their routes, the places with historical and archaeological interest that they mentioned at least, their moves among the various chronotopes, and the use of their predecessors’ texts for on their routes. With the use of digital platforms such as Recogito, their travel accounts have been annotated, tagged, aligned with ToposText gazetteer and Wikidata, exported as .csv files, and further processed using OpenRefine. By having as a ground theory approach the social construction of space, as Lefebvre has defined it, the thesis, with the assistance of ArcGIS and Python and the necessary manual steps, explored the topics as mentioned above. The analysis of these topics provided interesting results to the thesis. It showed the differences in the area coverage of the two travelers in Phocis and Boeotia. It also highlighted their accuracy in the discovering of ancient places and buildings. Moreover, it delineated their moves through the different chronotopes and the vital role of the physical environment as a bridge for these moves. Ultimately, this thesis revealed the crucial role of their predecessors’ travel accounts for their navigation on the respecting. Mainly, it made clear the vitality of the travel accounts of Strabo and Pausanias. These results were clearly connected with the social construction of space and time from the two British travelers based on their cultural background.

This thesis investigates women’s geographical movement in medieval England from the perspective of mobility and freedom. It uses pilgrimage accounts from medieval miracle story collections and to gather information about individual travel patterns. The study uses GIS to analyze gendered mobility patterns, and to investigate whether there were noticeable differences in the distance which men and women traveled and the geographical area of the country they originated. It also analyzes the nearness of men’s and women’s respective origin towns to alternative pilgrimage locations, as a means of examining the factors determining gendered travel mobility. The study finds that women’s travel distances were less than men’s, especially in the later medieval period, but that they were in fact more likely than men to come from areas proximate to alternative pilgrimage sites. This suggests the existence of higher mobility capacity for women living in areas with greater contact with other travelers.