Spanish Literature Commons^™

Las Islas En La Literatura Castellana De La Baja Edad Media, Martha Elena Granados Sáenz

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation explores references to islands in 13^th and 14^th century Iberian literature in a corpus of encyclopedias, travel books and chivalry novels from 1223 through 1396. I explore how island geography became part of the Medieval imago mundi. Many Medieval readers were interested in these faraway lands where, they believed, monstrous races flourished, sea monsters lurked, and Paradise awaited to be rediscovered. The physical and human geography featured in these narratives, gave birth to an imaginary, utopian, exotic, extravagant, and mysterious concept of “islandness” located in idyllic places to be interpreted as cognitive maps of the …