Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Deutsch, Lou C | Vernon, Kathleen | Flesler, Daniela | Pérez Melgosa, Adrián | Gazarian, Marie Lise.
Date
2014-12-01
Keywords
Literature | Contemporary Literature, Feminism, Mothers and daughters, Spain, spanish Literature, Spanish Women Writers
Department
Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature.
Language
es
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77682
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
This study adds to the current discussion on the literary treatment of the mother-daughter bond as used by Spanish contemporary women writers (1945-2013). It examines a representative corpus of novels to show how Spanish cultural, social and historical idiosyncrasy has produced differing modes of representation of the mother-daughter bond. This bond responds to a historically specific, autochthonous literary tradition as presented by the narrative of women writers of different generations: the postwar, the transition to democracy, and new novelists of the transition to the XXI century. Two main topics shape the treatment of the mother/daughter bond in these works: orphanage and/or the exploration of the maternal lineage. Their perdurance in the novels studied positions the writers in a continuum, a literary genealogy of their own. The cathartic process that many of the female protagonists go through in their quest for personal growth and self-discovery -- ultimately leading back to their female predecessors -- is also studied. The genealogical conception of history and the fluid relation established between text and context used in many of the novels position readers as both, witness and participant, inscribing them in the same genealogies depicted and, at the same time, in the process of rediscovering Spain ́ s hindered collective memory. The maternal bond in the first group of novels studied is violently severed by the war and its aftermath, by the brutal ideological depuration and reprogramming of the country as a method of nation- building, and by the thirty six years of dictatorship that followed. The trilogies studied in the second chapter, produced mainly during the transition to democracy, portray intergenerational relations of women belonging to the same family, many of them dysfunctional. The maternal genealogies depicted function as vehicles to pass on memories over a span of a century of Spanish history. Finally, the last chapter explores novels written during the transition to the 21st century in which a new type of literary orphan, the " millennium orphan" emerges often guided in their process of growth and self-discover by an elderly male figure " el viejo-archivo" . This process often parallels the recovery of the maternal figure and of a collective memory. | 210 pages
Recommended Citation
Alonso Almagro, Maria Nieves, "(Re)Vindicando a la madre: Matriherencias, orfandad y memoria colectiva en la narrativa contemporánea española escrita por mujeres | (Re)Vindicando a la madre: Matriherencias, orfandad y memoria colectiva en la narrativa contemporánea española escrita por mujeres" (2014). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3473.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3473