Jorge Amado: New Critical Essays (Latin American Studies) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815339321 ISBN 13: 9780815339328

Publisher: Routledge, 2001

Synopsis

Jorge Amado is simultaneously one of Brazil's most prolific and widely read novelists and one of its most controversial. Seeking to offer for his English-speaking audience the same range of critical thinking that surrounds his work in Brazil, this volume provides an introduction and chronology to Amado's life, followed by a comprehensive survey of his major works by some of the world's leading Latin American Studies scholars. As the case of Jorge Amado is central to the emergence of Brazilian literature in the twentieth century, this volume of original essays will place him in clearer critical perspective for English language readers.

About this title

About the Author

Keith Brower is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Salisbury State University. Enrique Martinez-Vidal is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College.

From the Back Cover

With his works currently translated into thirty-three languages, Jorge Amado is undoubtedly Brazil's best-known author abroad, a fact that, ironically, has had both positive and negative repercussions at home: on the one hand, Amado is a tremendously popular writer with a long record of advocacy on behalf of Brazil's economically disadvantaged and marginalized peoples; on the other, he has been accused of sexism and sexual stereotyping, of utilizing too many scenes of excessive violence against women, of romanticizing poverty, and of perpetuating what have been described as paternalistic racial views. But no one can deny the importance of Jorge Amado's contribution to modern Brazilian narrative, where his skills and charm as a storyteller merge Brazil's oral tradition with its written. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with whom he is compared, Amado knows how to make the local or particular express the universal.

In Jorge Amado: New Critical Essays, sixteen of the world's leading Latin American Studies scholars provide a comprehensive survey of Amado's works, addressing his religion and his revolution, his portrayals of women, his place in postmodern reconstruction, and his legacy in Brazil.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0815339321
• ISBN 13: 9780815339328
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 302
• Editor: Fitz Earl, Brower Keith, Martinez-Vidal Enrique