Historias ejemplarizantes del s. XVIIlos Sanyan y las Novelas Ejemplares

Laburpena

This work is a comparative study between Feng Menglong’s Sanyan and Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (“Exemplary Novels”), two outstanding collections of short novels published in the seventeenth century, compiled within very different socio-cultural contexts. Our work aims to find and analyze thematic, technical, and conceptual parallelisms between these exemplary stories, while situating them within the World literature framework. Since Chinese literature and Spanish literature had developed independently by that time, the research has been carried out from the perspective of the study of parallelisms in Comparative Literature. It is a supranational, cross-cultural, and comparative study, which refers to different cultural and narrative traditions. The thesis consists of four parts: Part One presents the biography and literary production of Feng Menglong and Cervantes, which has in consideration their respective sociohistorical contexts. Moreover, we follow the evolution of the concept of “novel” in Chinese and in Spanish culture, as well as the development of the short novel in both countries in order to locate the Sanyan and the Novelas ejemplares in their own literary contexts. Part Two focuses on thematic parallels between the two works, paying special atention to various frequent and popular themes in literature of the genre, such as love, marriage, and travels. More information is given on some similar plots to better understand the authors’ reflections on society and other matters. Part Three delves into the affinities of the use of narrative techniques and resources in the short novels of Feng Menglong and Cervantes, showing how, to some extent, Chinese and Spanish short storytelling in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries share certain methods of telling a story and satisfying popular demand. Part Four concerns with the core focus of this comparative study, the exemplarity of the Sanyan and the Exemplary Novels, one of the particular characteristics of these short novels. The study is based on a careful textual analysis, taking into account theories concerning the function of literature in both cultures. En virtue of the moralizing tendency revealed in the narratives and the statements made by both authors in the prologues of their collections as well as in other works, the exemplariness within the Sanyan and the Exemplary Novels has much to do with morality and educational purposes. Furthermore, we observe an unexpected degree of tolerance, which makes both of works stand out. In addition, this research also serves as a detailed introduction of the Sanyan and Feng Menglong, an eminent figure of pre-modern Chinese popular literature, to the Spanish-speaking world. The prologues and titles of all the Sanyan novels have been translated into Spanish