This thesis analyses how the contemporary Spanish fiction revives the tradition of literary exemplarity, through the study of seven novels published at the turn of the XXth and the XXIst centuries (1998-2004). This work tries to underline the evolution of the exemplarity notion in both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, and the study of the current analytical paradigm focused on the individual. The new forms of exemplarity in contemporary literature are considered through the reactivation of its traditional shape —the hero— but also with the new possibilities given by the questioning of boundaries between genre and the ambivalence of the reading pact. In a world devoid of ideological consensus, the authors of the corpus shape their own frames of understanding. Rather than a universal moral, they suggest subjective ethical answers that can be shared by the reader. The exemplarity, in its actual forms, produces new types of commitment that are based on an ethic inseparable from literary creation.
