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This article examines the Afrodescendant literature in Brazil today. According to scholars, Latin America was created, on the one hand, by a modern/colonial project, and on the other hand, identity specifications are still on debate. So, it is important to examine Afrodescendant literature as representative of silenced cultures, who, in this context, write of themselves. In the reading and in the analysis of literary texts from Afrobrazilian authors, I demonstrate that metalanguage and intertextuality with literature and history are some aspects of this production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article discusses the concepts of black literature and Afro-Brazilian literature from the existing debates in Brazilian history and literary criticism, taking as a reference the production of Afro-descendent authors from the 19th and 20th centuries. Also, it tries to estabilish a group of elements that, once reunited, may present references of distinction that provide the especificity of the Afro-Brazilian literature in contrast with Brazilian mainstream literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel O Crime do Padre Amaro is analyzed with special reference to the relationships between its creation and the process of aesthetic and political sensitiveness that underscored Eça de Queiroz's literary productions. The novel is discussed as to its configurations and meanings, as a product and a producer of contradictions inherent to the debate on liberalism and Catholicism in Portugal in the second half of the 19th century. The adaptations made throughout the several issues of the novel, the plot and its reception by critics in the 19th century are investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at investigating how animals have been portrayed by some modern Brazilian writers, such as Machado de Assis, Guimarães Rosa, Graciliano Ramos, Clarice Lispector e João Alphonsus. The purpose is to discuss the ways in which those authors deal with the so-called “animal question" and refuse to enclose the animals within the boundaries of the allegory and the metaphorical representation. It may be said that their works, far from being mere erudite restorations of the “bestiary" genre, are fictional and poetic spaces for critical reflection on literary and ethical matters related to the animal world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current article studies the main events in the schooling of the writer, politician and educator Mário Palmério (1916-1996), author of Vila dos Confins (1956) and Chapadão do Bugre (1965). Foregrounded on the analysis of primary documents, research concentrated on learning within the home and schooling in the primary, secondary, military and higher schools. A survey has been made on the experiences that influenced his ideas in the educational, political and literary fields. Results show that his relationship with nature, regionalist and nationalist ideas and his imaginary on the Amazon forest were highly affected by his schooling during childhood and adolescence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about the relation between history and literature in a specific historical novel, Marco Zero, written by Oswald de Andrade in the first half of 1940. Discussing the concept of historical novel and what João Alexandre Barbosa defined as "interval reading" - in which the literary discourse is understood as a way to produce knowledge, and not only as a reflection of it - I tried to comprehend how Oswald builds his narrative - creating a historical context and interpreting it -, how he works with categories such as space and time and establishes relations among his diverse and numerous characters. Oswald's writing is close to the concept of historical novel defined by Marilene Weinhardt, as he works on the limitations of the hegemonic historical discourse. So, analyzing aspects that were ignored by the critics of Oswald's books, that commonly considered Marco Zero a defective novel and/or a creative decline in Oswald's career, this article offers the chance to consider the Oswaldian's novel as a topic of historical discussion, paying attention to the different uses of history made by varied discourses that are in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book “A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro Dágua” by Brazilian author Jorge Amado is presented. It analyzes the main character of the novel based on the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens. Subjects discussed include the idea of self-identity in modern societies, dissociation between body and identity, and death.

This article is part of a wider project on the persistence of Realism in Brazilian literature. It stresses the ideological and moral aspects of Realism in Portugal which were more pronounced than its aesthetic character. It is based mainly on Eça de Queirós and his relation with criticism at the moment of publication of the novels 0 crime do Padre Amaro and O primo Basílio. Those novels opened the way to the dissemination, rooting and consolidation of Realism in Portugal as well as in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work presents Makunaima as the main character of the best-known and extensive oral legendary tradition of the inhabitants from the extreme north of South America, the triple border between Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana -etnographically designated as the circum-Roraima region, in order to examine the cultural role this character had before becoming the "heroe of our people" through the work of Mário de Andrade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at reviewing, through bibliographical and primary sources analysis, the history of one of Brazil's national anthems, the Independence Hymn, by Dom Pedro I, as well as bringing new subsidies for the study of the Brazilian musical press origins. It also intends to reveal some peculiarities of an early and lesser known piano and voice score of the Hymn, not present in today's editions of this composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aims to study the novel Encarnação (1877), by José de Alencar, in search to the wonderful perspective that does not appear among the author's literary criticism. Encarnação is the last novel written and published by the author in life, a few months before his death, in which the novelist seems to propose a different theme, never explored before in his production. We understand that the wonderful perspective, according to Todorov (2008) does not usually take place in José de Alencar's production, however, it appears in Encarnação and determines the interpretation of the action of its characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study about the assimilation of jazz into French popular culture of the 1930s and the emergence of a society of jazz enthusiasts, especially around Le Quintette du Hot Club de France. The transcription and analysis of Tiger Rag, composed by the members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (Nick La Rocca, Eddie Edwards, Tony Sbarbaro, Larry Shields and Harry da Costa) and performed by Le Quintette reveal performance practices of its main soloists: Django Reinhardt on the guitar and Stephane Grappelli on the violin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intellectual relationship between Antonio Candido and Ángel Rama since 1960, intended to modify the long tradition of frustrated attempts to unify the Brazilianthought with in a Latin American thought. The present article analyses the influence Candido’s Formação da literatura brasileira (1959) and Literatura y Sociedad (1965) had in Rama’s transculturation model, developed thorough fully in his book Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (1982), as well as how this intellectual dialogue founded an original critical language that pursued to integrate the Brazilian literature as a part of a continental literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay intends to apprehend the figure of the character-narrator of Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas through the analysis of its three main determinations: the free style of the deceased author, the phenomenology of the underground man, and the apprehension of the social type. The relationship between these different approaches (constructive, existential and socio-typological) is not one of mutual exclusion, bur rather a dialectic one. The result is intended to be the concrete concept, in the Hegelian sense of multiple determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, we analyze a short story by Machado de Assis, "Um homem célebre," in which the reader follows the frustrated trajectory of the character Pestana, a pianist and composer of polkas. Our approach is based on two theories that are not obviously compatible: Antonio Candido's perspective of the formation of Brazilian Literature, and the notion of torsion as outlined by August Ferdinand Moebius and commented by Jacques Lacan. Our aim is to demonstrate that, by maintaining an ironic distance in relation to the events of the story, the narrator performs the formative synthesis of the torsion whose existence the character is unable to perceive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has become commonplace to describe Machado de Assis's characters and narrators as deeper than those of his contemporaries, and his novels as representations more creatively ambiguous than most literary depictions of nineteenth-century Brazil. In this essay I argue that throughout his novels psychological depth is a function of moral imagination; and a troubled moral imagination is a necessary condition for the literary representation of the modern self. Machado's protagonists are able to fashion the public presentation of their selves by imagining alternatives to their origins, desires, and social predicaments. They have in their pasts a burden the,v need to overcome, and while doing so they find themselves in conditions of freedom and harm. Evil then arises as a consequence of moral dynamism, in solar as it becomes a project for undoing the other. The genesis or a radical conception of free will and evil in Machado's narratives goes back to his translation of Victor Hugo's The Toilers of the Sea (1866). His concern with a more meticulous characterization of inwardness deepens between Iaiá Garcia (1878) and Dom Casmurro (1899), when adopting the structure or a confessional narrative he arrives at a balance between disguised motives (malice), double chronology (nostalgia), and human life as an unfolding, reversible, and self-aware process (metamorphosis). To frame Machado's strategy for depicting moral change, I take from Augustine's Confessions the suggestion that retrospection is the only way of restoring the identity of someone whose self is marked by his or her sense of dissimilarity with the past. Finally, from Kant and Paul Ricoeur I draw the elements for a further consideration of evil as an invitation to think differently about seeing, judging, and narrating human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the topics addressed in this issue of the journal including tendencies in the study of texts by Brazilian author Machado de Assis, the translation and reception of his literary works and literary criticism of his fiction.

The article presents an analysis of Brazilian poetry for children from the 18th century to the last decade of the 20th century. According to the author, poetry for children in Brazil emerged as a literary genre at the end of the 19th century, since most poems were meant for family events. An historical overview of the main Brazilian poetry from the 18th century to the 20th century is given. Particular focus is given to the early works of Alvarenga Peixoto at the end of the 18th century, and the translations made by Tatiana Belinky during the 20th century.

The article presents an analysis of the literary work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges with a focus on his use of time. According to the author, time is a key element of the literary universe of Borges, which allows the reader to find several dimensions and meanings in his texts. The author offers an overview of different stories of Borges in which the use of time is explicit, such as "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan," "La biblioteca de Babel," and "Funes el memorioso."