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Lusophone or (Portuguese-Speaking) Regions of the World
Featured Resources
- Luso-Brazilian Review Luso-Brazilian Review publishes interdisciplinary scholarship on Portuguese, Brazilian, and Lusophone African cultures, with special emphasis on scholarly works in literature, history, and the social sciences. Each issue of the Luso-Brazilian Review includes articles and book reviews, which may be written in either English or Portuguese.
- Digitalia Hispánica This link opens in a new window Digitalia Hispánica is a database comprising over 27,000 e-books and e-journals in Spanish, from publishers located in Spain and Latin American countries. Resources are organized in different subject collections, including History, Political Science, Business and Economics, Religion, Social Sciences, and Philosophy.
- Dictionary of the Literature of the Iberian Peninsula by Contributions of Iberian-born writers have gone largely unrecognized by most European and American readers. The rich history of literary achievements in the Iberian Penninsula is now available in this unprecedented dictionary. Defining literature in the broad sense, the "Dictionary" includes historical, religious, cultural and philosophical writings as well as prose, poetry, and drama from the Iberian Peninsula. Virtually all entries have been composed by noted scholars and are complemented wherever possible by bibliographies of primary texts and selected critical studies as well as existing English translations of primary texts. This two-volume work generally includes literature from the tenth century to the mid-1980s and--with a few exceptions--is limited to writers born in the Iberian Peninsula. A guide to determining the format of the "Dictionary" was the classic "Diccionario de Literatura Espanola" by German Bleiberg and Julian Marias. But this updated and reworked version devotes more attention to writings by formerly neglected or forgotten works by female authors and to writers in major languages other than Spanish in the peninsula, including Portuguese, Catalan and Galician. There are also entries on major time periods, movements, and other topics. Titles of works discussed are translated to English. Wherever possible, the text of each entry is followed by a three part bibliography; and some cross-referencing. The "Dictionary" will appeal to English-speaking non-specialists as well as scholars of Iberian literature.Location: Mugar Memorial Library Reference X (PN849.S6 D54 1993 )Publication Date: 1993
A Companion to World Literature by
A Companion to World Literature is a far-reaching and sustained study of key authors, texts, and topics from around the world and throughout history. Six comprehensive volumes present essays from over 300 prominent international scholars focusing on many aspects of this vast and burgeoning field of literature, from its ancient origins to the most modern narratives.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2020
Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture
The original 1995 encyclopedia, an award winner from both the American Library Association (Dartmouth Certificate) and the American Historical Association, was celebrated as a landmark in the development of Latin American studies (The Americas). This new edition adds nearly 600 entirely new topics, replaces some 150 obsolete entries, and also provides substantial revisions to hundreds more. Every one of the 5,700+ entries has been reviewed for currency of content and bibliography. An entirely new illustration program features over 100 full-color photographs in addition to hundreds in black-and-white. National statistics have been conveniently tabulated for every one of Latin America's 37 countries. New content addresses research on prehistoric environments and cultures, U.S. Haitian interventions, the consequences of NAFTA and increased Mexican immigration, the troubled aftermaths of Pinochet's Chile and Fujimori's Peru, truth and reconciliation commissions, and the still-contested legacy of the Mexico City massacre of 1968. New leaders like Brazil's Lula da Silva and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez are profiled along with hundreds of other rising figures in politics, letters, and the arts. Newly commissioned master essays synthesize current knowledge on such major regional themes as Democracy in the Americas, Hemispheric Affairs, and the Hispanic Impact on the U.S. Includes full index and table of biographical subjects by profession. Edited by Jay Kinsbruner and an international team of consultants on three continents.
Location: Mugar Reference X F1406 .E53 2008Publication Date: 2008
New Books -- Recent Acquisitions
By the Rivers of Babylon by
A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal's most celebrated writers Incapacitated after the removal of a malignant tumor, the narrator, António, spends his days in a Lisbon hospital enduring the humiliations of severe illness. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he revisits fragments of his life and the people who passed through it. He recalls the village where he lived as a child near the Mondego River amid the eucalyptus and pines, his parents and grandparents and their tight-knit community of potato farmers and tungsten miners, and the woman he loved--an unexpected polyphony of voices and places sounding in sharp counterpoint to debilitating pain. By the Rivers That Flow conjures the past and the present all at once, revealing the power of memory to embolden us in the face of extraordinary suffering. This is António Lobo Antunes's homage to the beauty of a cherished life in its confrontation with imminent death.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction by
Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. It is also the first text to provide a pluralistic perspective on the representation of consumption in this fiction that moves beyond the concern with aesthetic judgment of culture based on binaries such as good/bad or elevated/degraded that have largely informed criticism on this body of literary work. Current Brazilian fiction provides a variety of perspectives from which to think about our daily interactions with commodities and about how consumption affects us all in subtle ways. Collectively, the narratives analyzed in the book present a wide spectrum of more or less hopeful portrayals of existence in consumer culture, from totalizing dystopia to transformative hope.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Coming of Age in the Afro-Latin American Novel by
Explores the dimensions of the coming-of-age novel in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Brazil, focusing on works by eight major Afro-Latin American writers The centuries-old European genre of the coming-of-age story has been transformed by contemporary Afro-Latin American novelists to address key aspects of the diaspora in various nations of the Caribbean and Latin America. While attention to Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Brazilian literature has increased in recent decades, few critics have focused specifically on the Afro-Latin American Bildungsroman, and fewer still have addressed novels from both Spanish- and Brazilian-speaking regions, as author Bonnie Wasserman does in this study. The memory and continuing impact of slavery especially shape these coming-of-age stories. Often interwoven with race is a focus on religion, particularly the importance of African folk religions and traditions in the lives of young people. Immigration-and the return journey-is another important theme in the novels. Coming of Age in the Afro-Latin American Novel discusses works&emdash;all published around the turn of the 21st century&emdash;by such important writers as Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa and Mayra Santos-Febres (from Puerto Rico), Conceição Evaristo and Paulo Lins (from Brazil); Teresa Cardenas and Pedro Pérez Sarduy (from Cuba); and Junot Diaz and Rita Indiana (from the Dominican Republic). Wasserman's far-reaching analysis is both rigorous and compassionate, shedding a clear light on ways in which descendants of Africans have experienced life in the New World.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia by
"The turn of the fifteenth century saw an explosion of literature throughout Iberia that was not just sentimental, but about sentiment. Alone Together reveals the political, ethical, and poetic dimensions of this phenomenon, which was among the most important of the substantial changes in intellectual and literary culture taking place in the crowns of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon. With careful analyses of lyric poetry, sentimental prose, and wide-ranging treatises in multiple languages, this study foregrounds the dense web of relations among these genres and linguistic and cultural traditions."
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2021
Decolonial Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature by
Winner, MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez's study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another. Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention. Figueroa-Vásquez contends that these diasporic literatures reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities. This study centers the cultural productions of peoples of African descent as Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2021
Being Portuguese in Spanish: reimagining early modern Iberian literature, 1580-1640 by
Among the many consequences of Spain's annexation of Portugal from 1580 to 1640 was an increase in the number of Portuguese authors writing in Spanish. One can trace this practice as far back as the medieval period, although it was through Gil Vicente, Jorge de Montemayor, and others that Spanish-language texts entered the mainstream of literary expression in Portugal. Proficiency in both languages gave Portuguese authors increased mobility throughout the empire. For those with literary aspirations, Spanish offered more opportunities to publish and greater readership, which may be why it is nearly impossible to find a Portuguese author who did not participate in this trend during the dual monarchy. Over the centuries these authors and their works have been erroneously defined in terms of economic opportunism, questions of language loyalty, and other reductive categories. Within this large group, however, is a subcategory of authors who used their writings in Spanish to imagine, explore, and celebrate their Portuguese heritage. Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Ângela de Azevedo, Jacinto Cordeiro, António de Sousa de Macedo, and Violante do Céu, among many others, offer a uniform yet complex answer to what it means to be from Portugal, constructing and claiming their Portuguese identity from within a Castilianized existence. Whereas all texts produced in Iberia during the early modern period reflect the distinct social, political, and cultural realities sweeping across the peninsula to some degree, Portuguese literature written in Spanish offers a unique vantage point from which to see these converging landscapes. Being Portuguese in Spanish explores the cultural cross-pollination that defined the era and reappraises a body of works that uniquely addresses the intersection of language, literature, politics, and identity.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2020
