From Tristan to Don Juan: Romance and courtly love in the fiction of three Spanish American authors

This thesis is centred on Gabriel García Márquez’s novel El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Álvaro Mutis’ novella La última escala del Tramp Steamer, and Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo. Its aim is to analyse how the works of these Spanish American authors are inscribed within the traditions of Tristan, Don Juan and other related stories. Analysis is rooted in three aspects: 1) the study of the language and style conventions in the initial works of romance and courtly love that are developed in the studied works on fiction. 2) It was crucial to see how the authors in question developed paradigms of gender relations through the traditions they borrowed, and 3) how the medieval and renaissance traditions relate to Spanish American literary discourse through matters of similar religious and social contexts, specific traits of Spanish colonization and the presence of medievalisms in modernity. García Márquez’s reinvention of the Don Juan through the alliance narrator-Florentino, Mutis’ depiction of the steamer as a symbol of love and poetry, Rulfo’s portrayal of the lover’s spiritual failure and Susana San Juan’s statements and redemption through her body, show the complexity with which medieval romances have been rewritten in twentieth century Latin America