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Abstract
The present work explores the various representations of travel as a literary motif in Early Modern Spanish Literature. To delimit in a practical way what would otherwise seem impossible, I will order my observations along an axis that goes from the realistic novel (the picaresque) to the allegorical novel, typified fundamentally in El Criticón. Throughout four chapters, the symbolic, pedagogical, and symbolic value of literary displacements are explored. In first place, I am interested in the way a fictional journey works as a formal and structural component that allows a narrative. In second place, my dissertation analyzes the peculiarities of various novelistic genres and how they dialogue with their historical context. Lastly, I observe how the picaresque novel, the Byzantine novel, and the allegorical novel, engage with the notions of linearity and circularity since one of the premises of my analysis is the degree to which they deviate from the classic model of the returning-home hero.
