Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Contributing to the encounter of multiple cultural and literary sources in the Brazilian short story, reflecting its Latin American identity, is an ahistorical, oral tradition of tales and legends from Amerindian, African, and European origins that came to be reflected in popular literature and folklore. While encompassing this folkloric background, a historical account of the modern Brazilian short story can be divided profitably into three chronological stages of development. The first extends from its nineteenth-century romantic origins and realist practices, dominated by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), topre-modernist currents before 1922. Modernism, a second phase centered in the 1920s and 1930s, provided new aesthetic criteria crucial for the development of the modern story. Its national, artistic program, based on Brazilianized language and the rediscovery of national reality, continues to guide story writers. Contemporary and postmodern trends – with a sharp popular, urban, socio-political orientation filtered through complex, highly referential narrative strategies for which the short story has become a preferred form – constitute a third phase leading from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1990s. Common to the three phases of development are stylistic and thematic currents in Brazilian writing, such as Regionalismo [Regionalism], race, social and psychological analysis, dialectal and expressive differences in Brazilian language, and formal experimentation. A brief overview of each stage will serve as a frame of reference for our historical, interpretive survey.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.