In Travels in My Homeland (1846), Almeida Garrett--the most prominent figure of Portuguese Romanticism--narrates his thirteen-day trip to Santarem, wittily intermingling personal experiences with a sentimental novel. Influenced by Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Garrett's masterpiece paved the way for great writers like Eca de Queiros and Machado de Assis and helped foster modern Portuguese prose. This collection, the first in English, supplies comparative contexts by leading scholars that illuminate topics such as narrative technique, gender relations, women and nationalism, literary...

In one of his most intriguing poems, Carlos Drummond de Andrade provides inspiration for this current volume of Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies - Brazil 2001: A Revisionary History of Brazilian Literature and Culture. The poem, called "Hino Nacional," is a paradoxical reconstruction of variegated efforts aimed at the building of the nation. In the final lines of the poem, however, it is "Brazil" - as an impossible Kantian thing-in-itself - that emerges and refuses all attempts to grasp its essence:

Brazil does not want us It is sick and tired of us
Our Brazil is in the...

For many decades, Jose Saramago has been a staunch defender of the role of literature to both serve and be perceived as public discourse. When, in October 1998, he became the first Portuguese-language author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, his conviction was supported by the assurance that, at any rate, this particular writer's literary discourse was guaranteed to be widely (and globally) publicized. If, as Wlad Godzich has claimed, the severely limited possibility of public discourse in the contemporary world is compensated by the ever-multiplying variety of ways to publicize...

The relationship between music and poetry is typical of early Cape Verdean poetry; one thinks, for example, of the mornas/poems by Eugenio Tavares. This sort of poetry existed side-by-side with the emphatically classi-cist poetry that imitated the rhetorical models of the mother-country's canon, an example being the poetry of Jose Lopes, to whom Arminda Brito dedicates an article in the first section of this edition.

The present volume has brought together the contributions of scholars of different nationalities who have dedicated themselves to a study of the literatures in the Portuguese...

It has been more difficult to steal Camoes from this critic Faria e Sousa] than to steal him from the Portuguese. The former is not necessarily a goal in itself (though, again fortunately, it is not up to me to read the minds of all Camoes scholars). The latter is most desirable. Hence the importance of a colloquium on post-imperial Camoes, in English and in America. It is fitting to recall that, ironically, Faria e Sousa's commentaries were written in Spanish and published in Spain, when Portugal was under Spanish rule. It is not a question of now showing Portugal (or its surrogate, the...

Despite the critical tone of many of the articles in this collection, today's Mozambique has the potential to become a true success story, not as designated by the outside world, but as determined from within. The fact that critical voices are now raised, as much in the rich cultural output of the nation as in the structures of civil society, raises the possibility of a tangible improvement in the lives of ordinary Mozambicans, since every problem must be recognized before a solution can be reached. Chiziane's interrogation of patriarchal practice, Momple's portrayal of corruption and abject...

The impetus for this volume, "The Other Nineteenth Century," stems from the homonymous conference that was held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April 2005. Over twenty scholars from the United States and Portugal delivered papers, and expanded versions of nineteen of these studies, along with five other relevant articles, constitute the present volume of Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies. The conference itself was designed to provide a forum to discuss works, authors and themes that are usually excluded from the repertoires of Lusophone literary and cultural history, and only...

Equating Vitorino Nemesio to "Azoreanity," Universality, Iridescence, Confluence, and Eroticism, draws inspiration from the content of the essays herein included and will not surprise anyone familiar with Nemesio's non-posthumous works, with the possible exception of the very last of the lexemes, "eroticism." Nemesio's oeuvre, starting with the collections of short stories Paco do Milhafre (1924) and Misterio do Paco do Milhafre (1949), and extending to the poetical collections La Voyelle Promise (1935) and Festa Redonda (1950), to the novel Mau Tempo no Canal (1944) and the travelogue...

Remembering Angola is a groundbreaking volume that brings together articles by leading scholars from around the world. From a range of disciplines, they reflect on the role Angolan culture has played in reformulating the torn fabric of a nation historically beset by strife and oppression. Thus, "re-membering" goes beyond recall, although many of the articles in the volume contemplate histories and memories--from those of the colonial war to those of post-independence exiles; from those of degredados to those of Angola's leading literary voices; from those of Portuguese women who witnessed the...