Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts And Latin American Culture

by Lucia Sa

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816643257
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	05/07/2004
Series:	Cultural Studies of the Americas , #16
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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