This study focuses on the legend of St Mary the Egyptian from Spanish literary sources from the Early Middle Ages to the Golden Age. Dating from the 6th century in Greece, this legend has had an immense and enduring popularity, which is manifested by hundreds of existing manuscr…
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El Amete de Toledo presents the story of a strong and faithful Muslim who is separated from his true love, removed from his homeland, and enslaved. His extremes of love and hate drive him to commit acts of great violence during his journey to spiritual conversion and death. This…
Among the numerous effects of the Muslim intervention on Spanish history, one of the most significant was the lack of development of the feudal system in much of Iberia, especially in Castile. Unlike France, whose monarch was a mystical figure with curative powers, the Castilian…
The Noble Outlaw or Krafkerl is the main hero of many of the masterpieces belonging to the Sturm und Drang and the early romantic period, but whereas this character is easily recognisable within German literature, he is not so in Italian literature, or at least, many pages there…
The subject of my dissertation is cinematic constructions of African immigrant and French identities. I analyze Vivre au Paradis (Bourlem Guerdjou), Soleil Ô (Med Hondo), La Noire de… (Ousmane Sembene), and Mémoires d'immigrés (Yamina Benguigui) from cultural, aesthetic, and pol…
French epic poetry enjoyed much popularity in the Middle Ages, as it celebrated the brave exploits of a popular hero. Such literature was often identified as belonging to a certain “cycle” of poems that associated the story of great figures of an illustrious family or the events…
This study offers a new reading of L'Etranger; a reading nevertheless suggested by Camus himself: "Meursault, le seul christ que nous meritions." My dissertation's focus, and therefore its relevance, lies in the oftentimes overlooked influence of orientalism and the Orient in Ca…
In this dissertation, I examine how, in the works of the French-speaking contemporary women writers Annie Ernaux, Agota Kristof and Farida Belghoul, notions of doubleness and/or schizophrenia represent at the literary level the contradictory pressures or double bind that these w…
Graindor de Douai's twelfth century works, the Chanson d'Antioche and the Chetifs are historical narratives of the First Crusade that form and document an intellectual and independent culture for the Old French language community. The Chanson d'Antioche includes its literary gen…
This dissertation catalogues and examines Albert Camus’s thematic repetitiveness as seen in his fiction and in how this repetitiveness relates to the world view presented in the so-called guillotine passage in his novel The Plague: that the world consists of scourges, victims, a…
The tale of Floire and Blancheflor was well-known in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The intercultural love story, imbued with the spirit of the Crusades, is set during the Spanish Reconquest. This dissertation explores the construction of frontier in three di…
In my dissertation, I argue that the mother/son relationship stands at the heart of Camus's novelistic writing. Le Premier homme, a semi-autobiographical novel written in the last two years of Camus's life, and finally published posthumously in 1994, allows us to re-evaluate the…
My dissertation focuses on the development of Spanish prose during the nineteen-twenties. The conflict in Morocco and the symbolic date of 1921 are the dialectical link between 1898 and 1936 that enables me to bridge the aesthetic and political tensions of the period. I take the…
Since 1948, the muwashshah and its kharja have stood at the center of fierce debates about the Arabic role in Spanish cultural and literary history. Samuel Stern's landmark article is widely credited with bringing attention to this peculiarly Andalusian form of strophic poetry. …
This study explores the remarkable existential affinities in the novels of William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Naguib Mahfouz. At the heart of these affinities are the authors' converging world views, best understood through their representation of the central existential preocc…
This dissertation examines the genre, narrativity and use of humor in Colonel José Cadalso's 1774 work Cartas marruecas (Moroccan Letters). The Moroccan Letters consists of a fictitious correspondence carried on between three people: Gazel Ben-Aly, a Moroccan youth traveling in …
My dissertation is a study of the cultural status and evolving significance of The Thousand and One Nights in France. Since its first appearance in Europe with Antoine Galland's translation (1704-17), this collection of tales from the Middle East has been popular with European a…
The concept of the author has changed over time, along with the forms of media that have been used to circulate texts. In my dissertation, I examine assumptions about writers with roots on the African continent by looking at representations of their status and function as author…
Emilio Villa (1914-2003) was a poet, visual artist, translator, critic and Bible scholar. His poems encompass modern and ancient languages, including Milanese, Italian, French, English, Latin, Greek, Sumerian, and Akkadian. The present study seeks to address two major issues con…