The essays collected in this volume look at the way that Mozambican and Angolan literary works seek to narrate, re-create and make sense of the postcolonial nation. Some of the studies focus on individual works; others are comparative analyses of Angolan and Mozambican works, with a focus on the way they enter into dialogue with each other. The volume is oriented by three broad themes: the role of history; the recurring image of the voyage; and discursive/narrative strategies. The final section of the book considers the postcolonial in a broader Lusophone and international context.

The relationship between music and poetry is typical of early Cape Verdean poetry; one thinks, for example, of the mornas/poems by Eugenio Tavares. This sort of poetry existed side-by-side with the emphatically classi-cist poetry that imitated the rhetorical models of the mother-country's canon, an example being the poetry of Jose Lopes, to whom Arminda Brito dedicates an article in the first section of this edition.
The present volume has brought together the contributions of scholars of different nationalities who have dedicated themselves to a study of the literatures in the Portuguese language, as well as those who work in other areas such as Linguistics or Comparative Literature but who have in recent years researched and published works on Cape Verdean literature. These include not only Cape Verdeans but also scholars writing from Brazil, Portugal, the United States, the United Kingdom and Galicia in Spain.