The Evolution of Literature in the Americas

Auteur

Earl E. Fitz is Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University, where he regularly teaches courses on Brazilian literature, inter-American literature, literary history, and translation. He is the author of many articles and some fifteen books on these topics.

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A literary and, to a lesser degree, socio-political, history of America, from its indigenous past to 2026, the book offers the reader a great deal of information about America, understood not merely as the domain of one nation but as a giant, hemispheric complex, one full of fascinating interactions and relationships.

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Dedications

1. Introduction. Inter-American Literature as Academic Discipline: A Definition and a Statement of Principles and Praxis. What inter-American literature is, what its study means, why it matters, and how it's currently being done; different approaches, different results; the pioneering role historians have played in inter-American study; early Brazilian inter-Americanists and the case for Brazil in the larger inter-American project; language study and the importance of the comparative method; some recommendations.

2. The Pre-Columbian World as Foundation and as an Enduring Ancient Tradition.

Our common New World heritage; Canada, or kanata, a Huron word for village or community; Tenochtitlán, the fabulous Aztec citadel; Nezahualcóyotl, the great poet and philosopher-king; the vast Incan empire; the Iroquois Confederation, the place of women in it, and Marxism; the nature of oral literature and its social significance; the enduring power of Native American literature and culture; the ongoing importance of our indigenous heritage to the inter-American project.

3. The Fifteenth Century: The Inter-American Experience Begins to Take Shape.

America as an idea and its collective invention versus America as political and cultural reality; visions (and revisions) of the New World as earthly Eden, a terrestrial paradise; Spain, England, Portugal, and France in 1492, 1497,1500, 1534, and, once again, England (now intending to settle) in 1607; Indigenous America and late fifteenth-century Europe; the European traditions that will be implanted in the New World and the impacts these will have on how culture and literature in the Americas will develop; the startlingly contrastive discovery letters of Spain's Colón and Portugal's Caminha and the very different traditions these represented and, in the New World, begat; the oral traditions of Native America and the written traditions of Europe; drama as a genre and the special role it played in cultural communication; the seeds of conflict.

4. The Sixteenth Century: Brazil and Spanish America Blaze a Trail.

Indigenous America; epic struggles between the powerful Aztec, Mayan, and Incan empires and the Spanish conquistadores; Luso-Brazilian différance; the clash of worlds hitherto unknown to each other; exemplary genres and the emergence of outstanding writers: Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Álvar Núñes Cabeza de Vaca, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, and Manuel da Nóbrega; key differences between Spain in the Americas and Portugal in the Americas; the birth of what will become two very distinct literary traditions, the Spanish American and the Brazilian; early French (and Portuguese) claims to Canada; Newfoundland (a disputed territory) and the voyages of Gaspar Corte-Real and Giovanni da Verrazano; Jacques Cartier; the French, their failure to make allies of the Iroquois Confederation, and the fur trade.

5. The Seventeenth Century: England Arrives in the New World.

Jamestown, 1607, and Québec, 1608; Samuel de Champlain and the establishment

of New France; the importance of the Iberian Baroque to literary and cultural

development in Spanish America and Brazil; early Brazilian identity and brasilidade;

the Puritan "plain style" and the intellectual and rhetorical arabesques of the Spanish

American and Brazilian Baroque; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the New World's first

great writer, intellectual, and feminist; Gregório de Matos ("the Devil's Mouthpiece")

and Antônio Vieira; Vieira and Sor Juana: the first inter-American literary dispute; the

French-Canadian Jesuit Relations; the importance of literacy and educational systems

to the development of literature in the Americas; Catholicism and the Jesuits versus

Protestantism and the Puritans; the development of letters, both religious and secular.

6. The Eighteenth Century: The Inter-American Project Becomes both More Viable and More Complex.

Religious and political conflict; the long struggle between France and England for control of North America comes to an end on the Plains of Abraham, on the outskirts of Montréal; revolution in New England, decadence and decline in Spanish American life and letters; steady growth and consolidation in Brazil; Brazilian Ufanismo; the "special relationship" between Brazil and the United States begins to sprout; the emergence of two distinct literary traditions, the North American "plain," pragmatic, and (in the English tradition) realistic mode versus the elaborate, opulent, and imaginative Latin American mode; the English influence in Canada versus the English influence in the United States; survivance and Québec's struggle to maintain its own linguistic and cultural identity; New World literature and the American revolution, new issues of influence and reception; political independence and cultural independence in the Americas.

7. The Nineteenth Century: Inter-Americanism Begins to Flower.

Political independence comes to Latin America: the Spanish American experience versus the Brazilian; Canadian Confederation and Canada's relationships with Great Britain and its New World neighbors; a synchrony of European influence, periodization, thematics (nature, independence, and miscegenation being three prime examples), and genre development in the Americas; the earliest novels; politics, slavery, a sharp increase in specific cases of inter-American influence and reception; the Confederation Poets; the importance of Poe and Whitman to the rest of the Americas; the portrayal of the Indian; differing American cultural identities; the special importance of Romanticism in the Americas; the concept of Nuestra América begins to take shape; Brazilian literature and a new consciousness of women, their identities, and their places in society; the questions of race and identity; the importance of Realism and the emergence of New World narrative, Machado de Assis and Henry James; Naturalism and its unique place in inter-American literary history; poetry, prose fiction, and five end-of-century gems: Henry James, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Émile Nelligan, Rubén Darío, and Machado de Assis.

8. The Twentieth Century: Changing Patterns of Influence.

Unease in Canada and Latin America over the growing economic and political power of the United States; issues of political, economic, and cultural influence; Modernism in the Americas; American Studies and the United States vis-à-vis the rest of the Americas; the case of Faulkner; the 1960s and the "Boom" era; Canada's "Quiet Revolution" and the new Canadian novel; Machado, Borges, Lispector, Márquez, and Barth and the influence of "Latin American" literature on writers and critics in the United States; the connections between Canadian, Spanish American, Brazilian, and Caribbean literature in the 1960s and 1970s; the importance of translators and translation to the rise of inter-American literature; new issues of influence and reception; García Márquez, realismo mágico, and English-Canadian narrative; Eduardo Galeano's epic American vision; the 1982 International Comparative Literature Association's recognition of inter-American literature as an emergent discipline; the growing importance of Canada, th…