La hija de Cervantes: un dramma romantico inedito di Aureliano Fernández-Guerra y Orbe. Edizione critica e studio

Aureliano Fernandez-Guerra is known especially among Quevedo’s scholars because he published the first complete edition of Quevedo’s works. Few people know his plays and, for this reason, they have never been studied. These plays were written during his youth, when Fernández-Guerra hadn’t decided anything about his career yet. Therefore, these plays were always very important for him and, for this reason, he continued to correct and to revise them. Among them, the unpublished drama La hija de Cervantes (1840) was considered the most important play. In this doctoral thesis I have tried to describe this Spanish author, especially focusing on theatre. In the first part I wrote about the life and the literary works, giving particularly importance to his plays that are La peña de los enamorados (1939), La hija de Cervantes (1840), Alonso Cano (1842) and La Ricahembra (1845), this last one written in collaboration with Manuel Tamayo y Baus, another important and famous playwright. In the second part I deepened the study of La hija de Cervantes because it is a particular interesting drama: Aureliano Fernández-Guerra chose to represent the author of the Quixote as a character of his drama, especially dramatizing the most mysterious moments of his life, such as the Gaspar de Ezpeleta’s murder, his relationship with his daughter Isabel de Saavedra and his supposed love for a woman, whose existence his unknown. Besides, this drama is interesting because it is partially autobiographic: I found several letters and articles where it is emphasized the similarities between Cervantes’ and Aureliano’s life: both feel misunderstood and not appreciated by other people and both had to renounce a big love. In the final part I presented the critical edition of La hija de Cervantes based on the last three manuscripts that are today at the Institut de Teatre in Barcelona. A wide philological note shows the transcription criterions.

Women Writers and Women’s Rights: The Denunciation of Women’s Conditions in the Texts of Mary Leman Grimstone and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Through the analysis of the prose of two nineteenth-century women writers: the English Mary Leman Grimstone and the Cuban-Spanish Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the present dissertation aims at unveiling the relationship between women’s writings and the struggle for the recognition of women’s rights in two different geopolitical locations. To do so, it weaves a Feminist Planetary Web between each writer and her context, as well as among both writers, finding points of connection and disconnection. It shows how women appropriated the pen in different geographical locations, exposing a particular female voice that denounced not only the oppression suffered by women, but also by other marginalized subjects. For each writer this dissertation exposes several macro-arguments present transversally in their work, like their critiques to the institution of marriage, the importance of proper education for women, the advocacy for religious tolerance, and the narrative construction of different male and female paradigms. The critiques to the institution of marriage is a point of connection between both authors. They also coincided in highlighting the importance of women’s right to access a proper education. Aside from these commonalities, this dissertation also analyses how Grimstone and Gómez de Avellaneda negotiated their position in the literary public realm, showing how it was precisely in this point that readers and critics can find noteworthy differences between them.