1949199045

9781949199048

1949199029

9781949199024 (cloth)

9781949199031 (paperback)

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

"The Black Butterfly focuses on the slavery writings of three of Brazil's literary giants--Machado de Assis, Castro Alves, and Euclides da Cunha. These authors wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Brazil moved into and then through the 1888 abolition of slavery. Assis was Brazil's most experimental novelist; Alves was a Romantic poet with passionate liberationist politics, popularly known as "the poet of the slaves"; and da Cunha is known for the masterpiece Os Sertoes/Sertőes (The Backlands), a work of genius that remains strangely neglected in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery. Wood finds that all three writers responded to the memory of slavery in ways that departed from their counterparts in Europe and North America, where emancipation has typically been depicted as a moment of closure. He ends by setting up a wider literary context for his core authors by introducing a comparative study of their great literary abolitionist predecessors Luis/Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama and Joaquim Nabuco. The Black Butterfly is a revolutionary text that insists Brazilian culture has always refused a clean break between slavery and its aftermath. Brazilian slavery thus emerges as a living legacy subject to continual renegotiation and reinvention"-- Provided by publisher.

"The Black Butterfly focuses on the slavery writings of three of Brazil's literary giants--Machado de Assis, Castro Alves, and Euclides da Cunha--from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher.

Project MUSE - 2019 Complete.

Project MUSE - 2019 Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Project MUSE - 2019 Literature.

Introduction

1. Castro Alves, O Navio Negreiro, and a New Poetics of the Middle Passage

2. Castro Alves, Voices of Africa, and the Paulo Afonso Falls: From Afro-Brazilian Monologic Propopeia to Brazilian Plantation Anti-Pastoral

3. Obscure Agency: Machado de Assis Framing Black Servitudes

4. "The child is father to the man": Bad Big Daddy and the Dilemmas of Planter Patriarchy in Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

5. Magnifying Signifying Silence: Afro-Brazilians and Slavery in Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões

6. After-Words and After-Worlds: Freyre, Llosa, Slavery and the Cultural Inheritance of Os sertões.

Alves, Castro, 1847-1871 > Criticism and interpretation.

Cunha, Euclides da, 1866-1909 > Criticism and interpretation.

Machado de Assis, 1839-1908 > Criticism and interpretation.

Abolitionists > Brazil > History.

Africans > Brazil > History.

Black people > Brazil > History.

Brazilian literature > 19th century > History and criticism.

Brazilian literature > 20th century > History and criticism.

Slavery > Brazil > History.