Bernardim Ribeiro y Alonso Nunez de Reinoso: Conversos, generos y la emergencia de la voz femenina en la narrativa iberica del Siglo de Oro (Spain)

My dissertation focuses on the ways in which Iberian literature connected to the conversos (converted Jews) challenged Inquisitorial Iberia's project of religious cleansing and cultural censorship. By giving voice for the first time in Iberian prose fiction to a female narrator unsupported by a framing male authorial voice, male Spanish and Portuguese writers of Jewish descent provided a novel forum for literary experimentation, which at the same time engaged the most pressing historical issues of their time.; Two works either written or published by exiled converses constitute the textual grounding of my study: Bernardim Ribeiro's Menina e Moça (first published in the Jewish-Portuguese press of Abraham Usque, in Ferrara, in 1554) and Núñez de Reinoso's Los amores de Clareo y Florisea y las desventuras de la sin ventura Isea (Venice, 1552). The marginal position of these texts, I argue, is intimately related to the way they approach and disfigure literary conventions. In open conflict with inquisitorial notions such as “tainted blood” and censorship, these writers call into question the purity of genres in prose fiction and traditional models of narrative authority. To the idea of pure genres they oppose a poetics of hybridization, through the model of the journey that enables the main character (a woman, in both cases) and the text itself to meander through different literary genres, often with conflicting conventions and aesthetics. As a response to the traditional third-person narrator, they manipulate gender boundaries with texts where the narrative control is loosened and subverted as textual authority is handed over to first-person female voices.; These texts permit me to explore a diversity of strategies by which the introduction of the female voice and a hybrid structure alters the world of romance at a time when political reality is dominated by absolutist monarchy and Inquisitorial repression. By demonstrating the interaction between gender, religious conflicts and society in the shaping of the modern novel, my thesis not only sheds light on debates about the relation of literary form to marginal identities in Early Modern Iberia but also, more generally, illuminates the ways literature engages and challenges society's defining values.