부산대학교 도서관

Summary: This dissertation is a comparative study of Azorín and Unamuno's writings on landscape, focusing particularly on the persona of the artist-intellectual that both authors cultivated, and on their innovative use of the article form. The figure of the intellectual emerged in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century, and both Azorín and Unamuno explored the critical and creative possibilities of this new role in their writings, and especially in their writings on landscape. A liminal space between the referential and the poetic world, landscape in their writings becomes a medium in which to project and cultivate this new persona. In the first section of my study I study how each develops the persona of the intellectual in relation to landscape in his respective first novels. In the second section, I examine each author's creation of a pre-history of his adult intellectual persona in his early memoir, and the role that landscape plays in his intellectual and artistic formation. In the third section I explore the dimension of orphanhood in each author's self-representation in the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish orphan narratives. In the final section I examine how each writer extends the narrative of literary self-creation beyond the boundaries of novel and memoir to the plastic article form. I show how Azorín “nationalizes” the French prose poem, especially as practiced by Baudelaire, by fusing this form with the cuadro costumbrista. I argue that Unamuno's decision to withdraw landscape description from his novels after Paz en la guerra was due in part to his religious conception of landscape. I also show how both writers attempt to overcome the increasingly impersonal relationship between author and reader in these writings.