Description:
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 discoveries of Colón and Caminha; the colonial poetry of Mexico's Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Brazil's Gregório de Matos; culminating in a meticulous evaluation of the poetry of Nicaragua's Rubén Darío and the prose fiction of Brazil's Machado de Assis. Fitz, an award-winning scholar of comparative literature, contends that at the end of the nineteenth century, Latin America produced two great literary revolutions, both unique in the western hemisphere, and best understood together.
Review Quotes:
The book's high degree of readability, its brisk pacing, minimal endnotes, and informative presentation of compelling pairings of Brazilian and Spanish American writers--many of which are expanded to include references to US and Francophone and Anglophone Canadian voices--speak to its roots in the classroom. Similarly to Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), this book serves as a primer and will be equally beneficial to Latin Americanists who are eager to understand Brazil and to Brazilianists seeking to place Brazilian literature into a broader regional context. It also provides a wealth of compelling comparisons that can be expanded into seminar papers and longer research projects. I will certainly assign the book in my graduate seminars, and I suspect that many colleagues will do the same.
--Luso-Brazilian Review