Recognized as a turning point in Brazilian literature, this entertaining novel of urban manners follows the ne'er-do-well Leonardo through his various romantic liaisons and frequent scrapes with the law. First printed in weekly installments in 1852, and later published in two volumes in 1854-55, Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant comprises a series of humorous vignettes held together by the adventures and misfortunes of this young rogue--who matures from a handful of a toddler into a ruffian of a boy and an idler of a young man--and his father, also named Leonardo.
Manuel Antonio De Almeida tells a story in everyday language that is rich in detail of life on the streets and the modest circumstances of the free poor of Rio de Janeiro. Through satirical accounts of the escapades of characters who always seem close to the brink of some personal crisis or social misstep, yet who manage to pull through by hook or by crook, Almeida makes a subtle and incisive comment on Brazilian urban society and culture of the nineteenth century. Now available in a new and lively translation, Memoirs of a Military Sergeant occupies an important position in the satirical literature of Brazil and the world.

'The Amazon' features eight essays by Euclides da Cunha, about his trip through the Amazonin in 1905, written to describe the Brazilian hinterlands to the urban citizens.

On Emerging from Hyper-Nation represents Ronald W. Sousa's attempt to answer the question, "Why do I smile on reading one of Saramago's 'historical' novels?" Why that reaction of emotional release? To answer the "smile question" the book engages in a critical mode that could be described as "discourse analysis." It combines several critical strains and relies on basic concepts from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Adlerian psychology, and contemporary cognitive psychology for their discourse-analytical value rather than as entrees into psychoanalytical reading per se. The introductory chapter presents some of the concepts that underlie that compound analytical modality and sets out an overview of twentieth-century Portuguese social and economic history. Then, with an eye to answering the "smile question," the book reads Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago's three novels, Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), and The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989). Or, better, it seeks to read Sousa's own reading of the three works, since focus falls on how each novel seeks to construct both its own reading and also Sousa as its reader. The discussion brings to light a number of textual phenomena that bear upon the "smile question." Among them are that the novels invoke, often subtly, the fascist hermeneutical heritage remaining from before the revolution of 1974 as a constituent part of their communication with the reader; that they summon up historical trauma; that they function as Freudian-style "tendentious jokes"; and that, through these various invocations, they seek to constitute a postrevolutionary Portuguese subject. The reading of Sousa's reading, then, ends up being a reading of some of the cultural forces at work in postrevolutionary Portugal.

"Control of the Imaginary " was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In "Control of the Imaginary " Luiz Costa Lima explains how the distinction between truth and fiction emerged at the beginning of modern times and why, upon its emergence, fiction fell under suspicion. Costa Lima not only describes the continuous relationship between Western notions of reason and subjectivity over a broad time-frame--the Renaissance to the first decade of the twentieth century--but he uses this occasion to reexamine the literary traditions of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, and Germany. The book reconstructs the dominant frames in the European tradition between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century from the perspective of a Latin American who sees the culture of his native Brazil haunted by unresolved questions from the Northern Hemisphere. Costa Lima manages to synthesize positions from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and history without separating the theoretical discussion from his historical reconstructions.

The first chapter situates the problem and grounds the emergent distinction between truth and fiction in a very close analysis of one of the first European historians, Fernao Lopes, who sets the tone for the condemnation of fiction in the name of the truth of history and the potential for individual interpretation. Costa Lima pursues these notions through the aesthetic debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the writings of the French historian Michelet. He also devotes an illuminating chapter to the invention of the strictures imposed on fiction.