Phd in STUDIES IN MEDIAEVAL PHILOLOGY, PALEOGRAPHY, ROMANCE
STUDIES

Thesis title: Lo spazio amazzonico nelle scritture ispanoamericane. Tra geocritica, geopoetica ed ecocritica

The discursive construction of the Amazon rainforest derives from the colonial legacy of the chronicles, which influence its subsequent literary representation in the novel. In the twentieth century, the ambivalent portrayal of the Rainforest — on the one hand, an object of desire and exploitation, and on the other, a threatening force endowed with agency — evolves in fiction in response to different historical contexts. Through the lenses of geocriticism (Westphal, 2006), ecocriticism, and geopoetics (Aínsa, 1986), this study offers a reflection on the spatial representation of the Amazon rainforest in a corpus of Spanish American texts, including chronicles and novels, with the aim of exploring the relationship between humans and nature, beneath which lies an entrenched hierarchy. Although colonial topoi recur, portraying the rainforest as a space of difference — a radical periphery that disrupts the linear time of progress and the categories of state order — these novels simultaneously transcend the idea of the rainforest as a marginal space. Furthermore, through the recurrent inversion of the civilization/barbarism dichotomy, they challenge anthropocentrism and the colonial logics of domination over nature. Thus, an ecological awareness can be discerned in these works from their earliest examples.