Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts And Latin American Culture (Volume 16) (Cultural Studies of the Americas) - Softcover

Sa, Lucia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816643253 ISBN 13: 9780816643257

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2004

Synopsis

Recaptures native literatures of the Amazonian rain forest

Native texts of the Amazonian rain forest have been viewed as myth or ethnographic matter—the raw material of literature—rather than as significant works in their own right. But in this unprecedented study, Lúcia Sá approaches indigenous texts as creative works rather than source material.

Disclosing the existence and nature of long-standing, rich, and complex Native American literary and intellectual traditions that have typically been neglected or demeaned by literary criticism, Rain Forest Literatures analyzes four indigenous cultural traditions: the Carib, Tupi-Guarani, Upper Rio Negro, and Western Arawak. In each case, Sá considers principal native texts and, where relevant, their publication history. She offers a historical overview of the impact of these texts on mainstream Spanish-American and Brazilian literatures, detailing comparisons with native sources and making close analyses of major instances, such as Mário de Andrade’s classic Macunaima (1928) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller (1986).

A redrawing of the lineage of Brazilian and Spanish-American literatures, this book advocates an understanding of the relationships between cultures as a process of “transculturation” rather than “acculturation,” emphasizing the often-ignored impact of the peripheral culture on the one that assumes dominance.

About this title

About the Author

Lúcia Sá is assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816643253
• ISBN 13: 9780816643257
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360