Rain Forest Literatures

Rain Forest Literatures

Amazonian Texts And Latin American Culture

Lucia Sa

Recaptures native literatures of the Amazonian rain forest

360 Pages, 6 x 9 in

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Rain Forest Literatures

Amazonian Texts And Latin American Culture

Series: Cultural Studies of the Americas

Lucia Sa

ISBN: 9780816643257

Publication date: May 7th, 2004

360 Pages

9 x 5

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.

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