New World Studies

From Their Origins through the Nineteenth Century

Earl E. Fitz

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9780813950020
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

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 end 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Iberian Origins
• 2. Indigenous America
• 3. The Literature of Discovery and Conquest: Spain/Spanish America, 1492–1600, and Portugal/Brazil, 1500–1601
• 4. The Flowering of Colonial Latin American Letters: Spanish America, 1600–1750, and Brazil, 1601–1768
• 5. The Enlightenment and Independence: Spanish America, 1730–1832, and Brazil, 1769–1836
• 6. The Nineteenth Century
• 7. Rubén Darío, Machado de Assis, and End-of-Century Brilliance
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index