D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry traveled individually to Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. In their respective trips, these three authors tried to know and analyze not only the place but the people who lived in it. After months---even years---of traveling, the three authors went back to their experiences in Mexico to create The Plumed Serpent (1926), The Power and the Glory (1940), and Under the Volcano (1947), respectively. Three English novels situated in Mexican space. The impact that post-colonial studies have had in understanding the imposed perspective of previous empires over other regions makes it impossible to sustain that this representation of the other is "transparent", that it's not mediated by form. Some concepts belonging to the study of rhetorical analysis---such as focalization and characterization---allow me to discover the different points of view that are at play in the creation of stories that describe a space not only unknown to the reader, but even new within the literary universe that subscribes them. These three novels inherit almost directly the narratives of exploration and travel of the 16th and 17th centuries. Therefore, they reflect an old narrative tradition of writing about what has been explored, of knowing a space and then recreating it in words as the background for travels that have been lived.

This project focuses in revealing the rhetorical techniques used by the authors to transform Mexico into the setting for different narrative worlds. By referring their readers continually to a country that has been visited, explored and surveyed by themselves, the writers contribute to the formation of one coherent narrative universe whose meaning is distributed throughout the three novels, but all together conforms what I've called Mexican space. This narrative world was founded by Lawrence, but Greene and Lowry follow in his footsteps and contribute to it. By not only situating their novels in a country that's explicitly referred to as "Mexico", but giving them the same thematic background---a religious upheaval---these writers create a consistent image of Mexico as a religious country where modern men go to seek spiritual reconnection in the period between two World Wars. The narrative space created by Lawrence, Greene and Lowry is then equally Mexican and religious, but this qualities are presented through a collection of sites and places that I've grouped for their analyses in four categories: topographical space, social space, religious space and movement. By reading these novels through their spacial representations, I propose a view of Mexico as a trope, a topos, in English literature that was created and solidified in the novels written by Lawrence, Greene and Lowry.