Overview

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 turn 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.

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9780813950013

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Reviews

“This book is 'old fashioned' yet visionary. Old fashioned because it is impervious to neoliberal university trends within 2000s hemispheric studies. Cutting edge because there is something truly astonishing about Fitz's four-decade-long commitment to the humanities and to literature as a comparative and multilingual field of study. It is a major work from an inter-Americanist pioneer who has served as the single greatest custodian of Literature of the Americas in print and in the classroom.” - Antonio Barrenechea, University of Mary Washington, author of America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies

Author Information

Earl E. Fitz is Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University and the coauthor, with Elizabeth Lowe, of Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature.

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