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"This collection brings together textual commentaries on thirty representative works of literature in Portuguese - either complete poems or extracts from longer works - ranging from the medieval lyric of the 13th century, through the poetry and drama of the Portuguese Renaissance, the great Realist novels of the nineteenth century, early twentieth century Modernism and post-1974 writings through to the present day, while also including examples of 19th- and 20th- century Brazilian literature. The authors chosen - poets, dramatists and novelists - are generally regarded as iconic writers, and the three most famous canonical Portuguese authors (Luis de Camoes, Fernando Pessoa, Jose Saramago) are featured, but the texts selected for commentary strike a balance between a focus on well-known and lesser-studied works. All the primary texts are reproduced in Portuguese, sometimes in original editions, with English translations added for the majority. The contributors variously explicate and contextualise the works they present, some focusing on hidden meaning, others on philological aspects of editing, others on their historical, intellectual and philosophical context, and others still on the process of translation itself. All, however, aim to develop the art of reading, for the benefit of scholars and students alike. Stephen Parkinson and Claudia Pazos Alonso are members of the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese at Oxford University, and editors of the Companion to Portuguese Literature (Tamesis, 2009)."
The purpose of this book is to help the English-speaking reader, with an interest in Spanish literature but without specialised knowledge of Cervantes, to understand his long and complex masterpiece: its major themes, its structure, and the inter-connections between its component parts. Beginning from a review of Don Quixote's relation to Cervantes's life, literary career, and its social and cultural context, Anthony Close goes on to examine the structure and distinctive nature of Part I (1605) and Part II (1615), the conception of the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho, Cervantes's word-play and narrative manner, and the historical evolution of posterity's interpretation of the novel, with particular attention to its influence on the theory of the genre. One of the principal questions tackled is the paradoxical incongruity between Cervantes's conception of his novel as a light work of entertainment, without any explicitly acknowledged profundity, and posterity's view of it as a universally symbolic masterpiece, revolutionary in the context of its own time, and capable of meaning something new and different to each succeeding age. ANTHONY CLOSE, now retired, was Reader in Spanish at the University of Cambridge.
Within the cultural and literary context of contemporary Portugal and Western literature, 1998 was unquestionably the year that Portuguese writing gained international recognition as JosU Saramago became the first Portuguese writer ever to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Readers who had never thought about Portuguese letters began to consume his books and, most importantly, opted for expanding their reading lists to include other important writers not only from Portugal, but from Portuguese-speaking well beyond the borders of Portugal. Global Impact of the Portuguese Language is a collection of Portuguese writing that is as rich in content and broad in scope as the diversity of its topics and writing modes of its contributors. The book is divided into three major parts. Part 1, "Different Cultural Perspectives of Portuguese Writing," contains thirteen chapters in which the first and opening one, "Portugal: The New Frontier" ably sets the stage for the book by examining from a cultural perspective how Portugal, a peripheral country in the new world system, serves as a microcosm of the problems of cultural intercommunication in today's world. Subsequent chapters are grouped in three categories: "The Voices of the Writers," "Critical Approaches to Cames," and "Fictionalizing the Nation." Part 2, "Portuguese Language and Literature Outside Portugal," comprises one section devoted to the Portuguese language in Africa, followed by studies about Portuguese discoveries as part of the historical process of remembering and forging one's identity, and finally a comprehensive historical development of Portuguese writing, both in Portuguese and English, in the United States. Part 3, "Portuguese Literature and Criticism Available in English: Suggested Readings" details the recent literary happenings which point to a possible renaissance in Portuguese literary production. The concluding part of this volume offers a short, comprehensive listing of anthologies, general studies, and the most popular translations of the best of Portuguese writing from Portugal and Africa. This lively volume constitutes a first pioneering effort to contribute to a deepening appreciation and understanding of Portuguese writing. Anyone interested in ethnic writing will find this book an invaluable education resource with which to begin an exploration of Portuguese writing in the United States. Asela Rodriguez de Laguna is associate professor of Spanish and director of the Hispanic Civilization & Language Studies Program. She is the author of Notes on Puerto Rican Literature: Images and Identities: An Introduction, and editor of Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Two World Contexts.
Already well-established in the Lusophone world, Mia Couto is increasingly acknowledged as a major voice in World literature. Winner of the Camões Prize for Literature in 2013, the most prestigious literary prize honouring Lusophone writers, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Yet, despite this high profile there are very few full-length critical studiesin English about his writing. Mia Couto is known for his imaginative re-working of Portuguese, making it distinctively Mozambican in character. This book brings together some of the key scholars of his work such as Phillip Rothwell, Luís Madureira, and his long-time English translator David Brookshaw. Contributors examine not only his early works, which were written in the context of the 16-year post-independence civil war in Mozambique, but alsothe wide span of Couto's contemporary writing as a novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. There are contributions on his work in ecology, theatre and journalism, as well as on translation and Mozambican nationalist politics. Most importantly the contributors engage with the significance of Couto's writing to contemporary discussions of African literature, Lusophone studies and World literature. Grant Hamilton is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the editor of Reading Marechera (James Currey, 2013). David Huddart is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kongand is author of Involuntary Associations: World Englishes and Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2014]
This companion offers a critical overview of a great part of the literary oeuvre of the acclaimed Mozambican writer and historian João Paulo Borges Coelho. The book advances new critical paths within Portuguese-speaking literary studies from a comparative perspective.
The contributors to this book attempt to describe, analyze, and interpret the literary events and practices that characterize the two decades of Portuguese political and cultural life after the 1974 revolution. This significant event provides the basis for all the issues discussed in this volume and emerges as a principal agent behind Portuguese "cultural renegotiation."
This is the first Chronology of Portuguese Literature to be published in any language. It presents a comprehensive year-by-year list of significant and representative works of literature published mainly in Portuguese from 1128 to the beginning of the current millennium. As a reference tool, it displays the continuity and variety of the literature of the oldest European country, and documents the development of Portuguese letters from their origins to the year 2000, while also presenting the year of birth and death of each author. This book is an ideal resource for students and academics of Portuguese literature and Lusophone cultures.
