Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel

Edited by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos

ISBN: 9781787354715

Publication: May 14, 2020

Series: Comparative Literature and Culture

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What is this?

Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel presents a framework of comparative literature based on a systemic and empirical approach to the study of the novel and applies that framework to the analysis of key nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. The works under examination were published during the period in which the forms and procedures of the novel were acclimatized as the genre established and consolidated itself in Brazil.

The 15 original essays by experienced and early career scholars explore the links between themes, narrative paradigms, and techniques of Brazilian, European and North American novels and the development of the Brazilian novel. The European and North American novels cover a wide range of literary traditions and periods, and are in conversation with the different novelistic trends that characterize the rise of the genre in Brazil. Chapters reflect on both canonical and lesser-known Brazilian works from a comparatist perspective: from the first novel by an Afro-Brazilian woman, Maria Firmina dos Reis’s Ursula (1859) to Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1900); and from José de Alencar’s Indianist novel, Iracema (1865), to Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s A Falência (The Bankruptcy, 1901).

Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva is Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies, UCL.

Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos is Full Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of São Paulo (USP). She has authored articles and chapters both in Brazil and abroad, and has recently edited Books and Periodicals in Brazil 1768-1930: A Transatlantic Perspective with Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (Legenda, 2014) and Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture; the Americas with Justin D. Edwards (Routledge, 2016).

Introduction: A Novel Approach to the Rise of the Brazilian Novel

Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos

1. Misterios el Plata: (Dis)Figuring History to Forge a Space for a Woman’s Agency

Rita Terezinha Schmidt

2. The Historical Significance of Memórias de um sargento de milícias

Edu Teruki Otsuka

3. A providência, recordação dos tempos coloniais and the Novel in Brazil

Marcus Vinicius Nogueira Soares

4. Maria Firmina dos Reis and the First Afro-Brazilian Novel

Eduardo de Assis Duarte

5. 'A suspicious sound interrupted the gentle harmony': Iracema, by José de Alencar

Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass