Iberian Studies Through the Lens of Combined and Uneven Development: The World-System in Literature, Translation and Multicultural Exchange

This thesis proposes a reconceptualisation of Iberian Studies by using Leon Trotsky’s notion of combined and uneven development. With this theoretical framework, the complex sequence of events and web of interconnections that have contributed to Iberia’s semi-peripheral state within the modern world-system are duly contextualised. Demonstrating a complicity with the work of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), the thesis posits Iberism as a worldview and engages with notions of World-Literature, translation theory and the Environmental Humanities in order to formulate a systematic understanding of literary and cultural modalities of being.