Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Paper Pg 5

Literature and Culture of Portugal and Brazil from 1595

(N.B. Pg. 5 has been suspended until further notice. Therefore, this paper will NOT be available for examination, available as Optional Dissertation ONLY.)

Reading List

This Part II paper will address issues of gender, sexuality, family and society in the literatures of Portugal and Brazil. It will concentrate on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, from a variety of genres: novels, poetry and drama. It will also introduce founding Renaissance texts by Luís de Camões, and will include a component from the visual arts, focusing on the works of the Portuguese artist Paula Rego. Texts, authors and artists will be taught in the context of significant historical and political events in the periods and countries covered, and appropriate aspects of theory.

Supervisions and examining will be topic-based, in line with current Part IB and Part II papers in Spanish and Portuguese. Topics studied will include tragedy and its role in the definition of personal and national history; themes related to love and to the family (romantic love, marriage, adultery, incest, illegitimacy, patricide/matricide); gender and sexuality and their articulation through the political ideology of the various periods covered; the phenomenon of regionalist literature and associated themes relating to the Nature/Society dichotomy.

Topics

Gender and Sexuality
Tragedy
Family, Society and the Law
Regionalism, National Identity, Nature and Society
Love

Authors and Artist*

Portugal

Luís de Camões
Almeida Garrett
Eça de Queirós
Hélia Correia
Júlio Dinis
Paula Rego

Other indicative authors:

Cesário Verde
Florbela Espanca
Camilo Castelo Branco
Alexandre Herculano
José Saramago

Brazil

Machado de Assis
João Cabral de Melo Neto.

Cambridge bookshops (Heffers and Waterstone's) are aware of our reading lists. You may be able to purchase second-hand copies of some of the books from Heffers (tel. 01223 568568). You might also like to try online book-sellers like Amazon, alibris or abebooks.

*The Department gives notice that, in any given year, lectures for this paper will not necessarily cover all of the above authors or artists: candidates for the paper will be advised at the beginning of each year's lecture course which, if any, authors are to be omitted.

A full Reading List for this paper is now available online