This thesis explores the role of exile in the work of the Spanish Republican Arturo Barea (1897-1957). It suggests that, linked to the movements that exile generates (physical, social and intellectual), the concept of ‘transnational’ can be used as an analytical tool with which to interrogate Barea’s work and its interpretations. It was during his exile in Britain that Barea became a professional writer, a literary critic and a broadcaster for the BBC. He published his autobiographical trilogy The Forging of a Rebel, edited by T.S. Eliot, in London between 1941 and 1946. This work was immediately translated into several languages, but was only printed in Spanish in its Argentinian edition of 1951, and was not published in Spain until 1977. Through a combined reading of the trilogy alongside a larger body of fictional and non-fictional work the thesis offers a detailed historical analysis of the first context of production and reception of Barea’s writing in Britain, focusing on the period of 1938-1945. It highlights the challenges and opportunities of exile as a transnational and cosmopolitan experience, and demonstrates the different ways in which the homeland and the host state intersect in Barea’s work. Barea’s writings are read here as exercises of cross-cultural translation in which Spain, its people and the Spanish Civil War were construed for a British – and later international – public, while Britain, its people and their role in the Second World War were also interpreted for a Latin American audience. This thesis emphasizes the historical importance of the informal intellectual networks, the publishing landscape, and the ‘corporate cosmopolitanism’ of the BBC as the institutional sites in which Barea developed his work. A transnational and cosmopolitan approach can offer an avenue to analyse Spanish Republican exile cultural products in a wider historical setting.

A Spaniard in Hertfordshire : the intellectual exile of Arturo Barea

Women’s Fashion Accessories examines the textual and visual representation of accessories in Iberian and Latin American cultural contexts ranging from the 1830s to the early 1900s. Drawing from gender studies, social anthropology, and cultural theory, I demonstrate how items of dress produced a symbolic arena in which cultural meanings and values were transformed and reshaped at both national and transnational levels. During this period, accessories reveal entire networks of negotiations and strategies that often involved significant issues of gender, race, class, and national identity on both sides of the Atlantic. Fashion objects were also metaphorical items in which the meaning of “modernity” in a peripheral context was negotiated, as well as a mechanism to debate the political and cultural approaches that would “modernize” Spain and postcolonial Latin America. This dissertation focuses on three essential pillars: 1) nationalism and the birth of Spanish-American nation-states, 2) the dissemination of journalistic and literary culture, and 3) the emergence of a fashion industry linked to consumption and economic growth. Of principal importance, middle-class women became active participants in the economy and expressed themselves through the consumption of certain fashionable items. I analyze these phenomena in Spain and Latin America, as well as their complex entry into modernity, by tracing the transnational circulation of accessories. Drawing from an interdisciplinary theoretical approach that connects a variety of disciplines in the humanities, my dissertation expands on recent debates in fashion studies, particularly those concerning clothing’s role in the construction of modernity and reconfiguration of nineteenth-century gender and social roles. In the first chapter, I discuss how accessories designed in Paris helped articulate the evolving idea of “modernity” and reinforced its artistic expression. The second chapter covers Spanish mantillas and Argentine peinetones, both of which were employed to identify and polarize the ideological gap between political groups. In subsequent chapters, I consider accessories of Asian origins––Spanish mantones de Manila and Mexican rebozos––in relation to issues of national identity, race, and social class. Finally, I analyze the role of corsets within the changing position of femininity and female participation in the public sphere.

Accesorios de moda femenina: género, modernidad e identidad nacional en el siglo XIX ibérico y latinoamericano

........................................................................................... 305 Autobiographical Statement .................................................................. 307

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Hallowed ground: Literature and the encounter with God in post-Reformation England, c.1550--1704

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Milton's Visionary Obedience

OF THE DISSERTATION Romancing Visual Women: From Canon to Console

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Romancing Visual Women: From Canon to Console

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), a national conflict with international significance, inspired strong responses from artists and writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The bombing of the Basque town Guernica, the assassination of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, and the defense of Madrid are just some of the events represented in painting, film, fiction, memoir, and history produced during the war years and since.Courses dealing with the Spanish Civil War are given regularly in literature, foreign language, and history departments, in English and in Spanish. This volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching helps instructors plan courses that exploit the interdisciplinary, multigeneric opportunities present in the period's aesthetic output. In thirty-five essays, contributors negotiate the complex relation between art and history in depictions of the war and its aftermath, exploring how memory is shaped. Key representations of the war, like Picasso's Guernica, Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Rodoreda's La placa del Diamant, Sender's Requiem por un campesino espanol, and Capa's Falling Militiaman, find a place in this wide-ranging volume. In addition, coverage extends to less frequently taught works by Catalan, German, Irish, and Latin American novelists, poets, and visual artists. The volume concludes with a section of resources for further study and classroom use, including films, music, photography, Web sites, and course syllabi and commentaries."

Teaching representations of the Spanish Civil War

In this thoughtful and compelling book, leading Spanish literature scholar Noel Valis re-examines the role of Catholicism in the modern Spanish novel. While other studies of fiction and faith have focused largely on religious themes, Sacred Realism views the religious impulse as a crisis of modernity: a fundamental catalyst in the creative and moral development of Spanish narrative.

Sacred realism: religion and the imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)As I was reading this splendid new book, an image from another book arose: that of an etching in black and white of Martin Luther in bed and confronting the devil. The image appears in the first pages of a now classic novel of the post-Franco era, Carmen Martin-Gaite's The Back Room (El cuarto de atras , 1979; San Francisco: City Lights, 2000). She describes Luther's adversary as a naked figure completely drawn in black, with horns and great wings, but even more striking is the use to which she puts the image, which serves as a small mirror reflecting the problem of appearances. The one thing that orients her first-person narrator is the title of the etching, "Luther Meeting the Devil." The words themselves providing an escape from the "abysses and labyrinths" surrounding her. The entire novel plays continually with the uncertainties of reality, in which a man dressed in black mysteriously appears out of nowhere and begins an all-night conversation with the narrator/protagonist. By no means a religious or religiously inspired novel, The Back Room nonetheless is driven by the demon of uncertainty.That is what Susan Schreiner's book is about. But to get to that dramatic high point, to "unmasking the angel of light," or discerning the bad from the good among spirits, Schreiner first sets up a richly layered and nuanced discussion of the various ways that the question of certainty shaped the debates and writings of sixteenth-century Europe. Precisely because this period is a transitional one, a continuation in part of the medieval era, the desirability and dangers of certitude become paramount in debates about salvation, authority, discernment of the spirits, experience, appearances, and reality. When all is in flux, nothing is certain. One of the virtues of this book is the breadth of coverage and examples Schreiner provides, bringing in both Catholic and Protestant as well as religious and secular figures, including Luther, Thomas More, Montaigne, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Thomas Muntzer, Sebastian Franck, Juan de Valdes, and Shakespeare. She also surveys current and established scholarship, incorporating the insights of Karsten Harries, Louis Dupre, Stephen Toulmin, and others, while also attending to primary texts with careful and stimulating analyses.The book is divided into seven chapters: "Beginnings: Questions and Debates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries"; "'Abba! Father!': The Certainty of Salvation"; "'The Spiritual Man Judges All Things': The Certainty of Exegetical Authority"; "Are You Alone Wise?: The Catholic Response"; "Experientia: The Great Age of the Spirit"; "Unmasking the Angel of Light: The Discernment of the Spirits"; and "'Men Should Be What They Seem': Appearances and Reality." Each chapter flows into the next, providing not only a series of natural transitions, but a logical argument moving from theological questions of salvation and authority to secular doubts about appearances. At the same time, she argues convincingly that all these issues are really bound together by the overriding problem of certainty. …

Are You Alone Wise?: The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era

In the feminine mode : essays on Hispanic women writers

Not easily translated, the Spanish terms cursi and cursiler i a refer to a cultural phenomenon widely prevalent in Spanish society since the nineteenth century. Like "kitsch," cursi evokes the idea of bad taste, but it also suggests one who has pretensions of refinement and elegance without possessing them. In The Culture of Cursiler i a, Noel Valis examines the social meanings of cursi, viewing it as a window into modern Spanish history and particularly into the development of middle-class culture.

Valis finds evidence in literature, cultural objects, and popular customs to

argue that cursileria has its roots in a sense of cultural inadequacy felt by the lower middle classes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. The Spain of this era, popularly viewed as the European power most resistant to economic and social modernization, is characterized by Valis as suffering from nostalgia for a bygone, romanticized society that structured itself on strict class delineations. With the development of an economic middle class during the latter half of the nineteenth century, these designations began to break down, and individuals across all levels of the middle class exaggerated their own social status in an attempt to protect their cultural capital. While the resulting manifestations of cursiler i a were often provincial, indeed backward, the concept was—and still is—closely associated with a sense of home. Ultimately, Valis shows how cursileria embodied the disparity between old ways and new, and how in its awkward manners, airs of pretension, and graceless anxieties it represents Spain's uneasy surrender to the forces of modernity.

The Culture of Cursiler i a will interest students and scholars of Latin America, cultural studies, Spanish literature, and modernity.

Nöel M. Valis

Papers

Teaching representations of the Spanish Civil War

Sacred realism: religion and the imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative

Are You Alone Wise?: The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era

In the feminine mode : essays on Hispanic women writers

The Culture of Cursilería