In this wide-ranging study, JosE Manuel Lopes proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the role of description in prose fiction. He offers readings of texts drawn from four national literatures--French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian--testing his model across a cultural and temporal spectrum. This critical breadth also illustrates the significance of description in disparate contexts: the postmodern novel, which implicitly challenges conventional notions of foreground and background, as well as the naturalist and realist fiction of the nineteenth century.

Lopes applies his...