““This exploration of class, feminism, and cultural identity (including issues of race, nation, colonialism, and economic imperialism) focuses on the work of four writers: the Mozambican Mia Couto, the Portuguese José Saramago, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, and the South African J. M. Coetzee.” — Purdue University Press”
Blurbs/Reviews
"In a disciplinary field still largely dominated by the primacy of area studies, Irene Marques's critical engagement with a range of narratives from across the Lusophone and Anglophone world is refreshingly innovative and represents an important contribution to comparative literary study.Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity will be of special relevance to those working on Couto, Saramago, Lispector, and Coetzee, as well as to those with an interest in issues of language, postcolonialism, identity, gender studies, and the interplay between the aesthetics of literature and expressions of social and political concern." — David Brookshaw, University of Bristol
"The task of literary criticism at present is to imagine a politics that fits the globe and transcends nations. If it is still too early to achieve that, at least we must put political visions from distant places in dialogue. Irene Marques accomplishes this important task by bringing together four authors from both sides of the Atlantic, both sides of the equator, and both sides of Africa—Couto, Saramago, Lispector, and Coetzee. The novels she considers are not all explicitly political, but what Marques discovers is that implicit politics are not less political. All the authors Marques considers are white by one measure, but she shows the different meanings of white and the varying potential of white to become other in South Africa, Mozambique, Portugal, and Brazil. Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity has crucial things to say about race and nation, politics, and aesthetics today." —Neil ten Kortenaar, University of Toronto
Sample
“Chin Ce’s poetry is intrinsically animistic and romantic in a manner reminiscent of both William Wordsworth and Léopold S. Senghor, one of the finest African poets of the Négritude movement. […] Ce’s poetry is profoundly beautiful and easy to the eye and to the mind. His language is generally not obscure; it possesses a pristine transparency that aligns itself with the poet’s need to merge with the larger self. And furthermore, because of its foremost levity, it permits the reader to also share in the pleasure of the extra-terrestrial voyage that is the mind of the poet and enjoy, enjoy… As Wordsworth would say himself: “The Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion (259).” Ce’s poetry, like most powerful poetry, is a divine call, a profound yearning for wholeness in a world that has become too acquainted with the smallness of dissected disconnected particles. Ce’s poetry is circular and round like the Moon when it is FULL. It is the revolving call of the wolf, who in his desperate and lonely night calls the ‘lover’ that he has lost and misses dearly. If the characters of Children of Koloko speak the language of loss, confusion and spiritual decadence, the shamanistic speaker of Full Moon utters the language of discoveries, enlightenment and transcendence.”