This dissertation examines space and gender in three medieval and early modern Mediterranean texts: the illustrated, anonymous, thirteenth-century Arabic manuscript from Seville, Bayad wa Riyad, the anonymous thirteenth-century Old French Romance Aucassin et Nicolette , and Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina (1499). In each text I examine how relations of power are affected by the presence, and in some cases the absence, of gardens. The garden in these three texts defies the binary opposition that has traditionally been used in the discussions of space and gender, since it is difficult, even impossible, to designate it an exclusively male or female space. As a domain of in-between, the garden in the three works operates as a place of both permissibility and prohibition, thus making it a safe stage for the manifestation of struggles and negotiations of power. Each of the three texts offers a unique, yet interrelated illustration of how the garden, because of its ambiguous nature, is transformed into a space for the emergence of subjectivity and the constant shift of identities. Most importantly, I argue that by reading the three texts against each other, one begins to see the medieval and early modern Mediterranean region as an interconnected network in which books, stories, plants, and motifs circulated from one geographical area to the other, defying today's national and linguistic boundaries / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_23809 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Contributors | Bouachrine, Ibtissam (Author), Dangler, Jean (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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