UC Santa Barbara

In the decades following World War I, patterns of intellectual and artistic exchange between Brazil and the rest of the world experienced a paradigmatic shift. As Monteiro Lobato hoped and Eduardo Prado feared, in the coming years of the Modernist movement an intense cultural relationship with the United States established itself amidst reorganization. This included the proliferation of U.S. texts, and their translations, in-country, as the English language gradually rose to the status of global lingua franca. An increasing dialogue between the Brazilian writer and U.S. literature accompanied this shift, often focused on the conception and representation of the artist in relation to the collective. This monograph suggests that, as a result of this dialogue, a motif establishes itself in these years—one in which U.S. notions of the artist as hero are subverted in the Brazilian context to both celebrate local culture and effect social criticism. The texts considered here range from the 1920s to the early 1970s, drawing in particular from the work of Mário de Andrade, Fernando Sabino, Érico Veríssimo, and Lygia Fagundes Telles.