Complex and hauntingly beautiful, Lygia Fagundes Telles's most acclaimed novel is a journey into the inner lives of three young women, each revealing her secrets and loves, each awaiting a destiny tied to the colorful and violent world of modern Brazil. Sensual and wealthy Lorena dreams of a tryst with a married man. Unhappy Lia burns with a frantic desire to free her imprisoned fiancé. Glamorous Ana Clara, unable to escape her past, falls toward a tragedy of drugs and obsession. Intimate ...

Charting the twentieth-century course of the literature of the AmericasThe second volume of Earl E. Fitz’s magisterial survey of the field, The Literatures of Spanish America and Brazil: The Twentieth Century analyzes Spanish- and Portuguese-language writing throughout South and Central America as well as in the United States and Canada, where it expanded and flourished over the course of the century. Fitz argues that Spanish American and Brazilian literat...

This book offers a systematic and comparative history of the evolution of literature in the Americas, from the beginning to the present day. It begins with an introduction that assesses the development of the field and then proceeds to a chapter on the literature of Pre-Columbian and indigenous America. It then moves forward chronologically, from the arrival of the Europeans (beginning in 1492) to the year 2026. Including indigenous literature, the other American literatures represented in...

Examines the reception of Brazil's most-canonized writer in the United States to shed light on questions of Blackness and hemispheric American experience.Considered a genius in his own lifetime, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is Brazil's most canonized writer. Yet, he remains a contested and even enigmatic figure to readers in Brazil and abroad, his relative silence on slavery leaving him vulnerable to charges of aspirations to whiteness. Machado de...

In this survey of Central and South American literature, Earl E. Fitz provides the first book in English to analyze the Portuguese- and Spanish-language American canons in conjunction, uncovering valuable insights about both. Fitz works by comparisons and contrasts: the political and cultural situation at the end of the fifteenth century in Spain and Portugal; the indigenous American cultures encountered by the Spanish and Portuguese and their legacy of influence; the documented discoverie...

This book makes the argument that Machado de Assis, hailed as one of Latin American literature’s greatest writers, was also a major theoretician of the modern novel form. Steeped in the works of Western literature and an imaginative reader of French Symbolist poetry, Machado creates, between 1880 and 1908, a “new narrative,” one that will presage the groundbreaking theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure by showing how even the language of narrative cannot escape being elusive and...

This book examines the nature and function of the main female characters in the nine novels of Machado de Assis. The basic argument is that Machado had a particular interest in female characterization and that his fictional women became increasingly sophisticated and complex as he matured and developed as a writer and social commentator. This book argues that Machado developed, especially after 1880 (and what is usually considered the beginning of his “mature” period), a kind of anti-reali...

This edited volume is a collection of twelve interdisciplinary essays from various Brazilian literary scholars, historians, and anthropologists analyzing the work of 19th- and 20th-century Afro-Brazilian writer Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto. This is the first collection to present a cohesive analysis of this writer’s work in English. It is an intellectually diverse collection of essays that recover Barreto’s œuvreand consider a wide range of topics, including Barreto’s treatment of race...

Driven by an unfulfilled desire for the unattainable, ultimately indefinable Other, the protagonists of the novels and stories of acclaimed Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector exemplify and humanize many of the issues central to poststructuralist thought, from the nature of language, truth, and meaning to the unstable relationships between language, being, and reality. In this book, Earl Fitz demonstrates that, in turn, poststructuralism offers important and revealing insights into all aspe...

Inter-American literary study is an exciting and fast-growing area of comparative scholarship. The Americas are tied together by a common historical heritage and by a history of social, political, economic, and cultural interaction.As a contribution to this field, this book brings together the literatures and literary histories of English and French Canada, the United States, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Brazil. The periods focused on include the Colonial Period, the Ninetee...

Clarice Lispector: From Brazil to the World explains why the Brazilian master was so transformative of modern Brazilian literature and why she has become such a celebrity in the world literature arena. This book also shows why Lispector is not one writer, as many think, but many writers. By offering close readings of her novels, stories, and nonfiction pieces, Earl E. Fitz shows the diverse sides of her literary world. Chapters cover Lispector’s devotion to language and its connec...

"Latin America" is a concept firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and historical meanings. And yet, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo argues in this landmark book, it is an obsolescent racial-cultural idea that ought to have vanished long ago with the banishment of racial theory. Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea makes this case persuasively.Tenorio-Trillo builds the book on three interlocking steps: first, an intellectual history of the concept of Latin Americ...