Antonio Candido: On Literature and Society

"This book is a welcome contribution to Brazilian and Latin American literature. Becker's fluid translation skillfully communicates the clarity and subtlety of the Portuguese original."—Choice

"Antonio Candido is one of Brazil's most important literary scholars. I should place his best essays on a par with Erich Auerbach's work on Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature or some of the chapters in Mimesis. An even closer parallel would be some of the critical essays of Octavio Paz. Like Auerbach and Paz, Candido is an intellectual with a wide range of interests, rather than an academic whose speculations remain within the limits of his discipline. Like them, too, he writes clearly in a style accessible to a general reader. The essays selected here give a good idea both of the kind of problems Candido addresses and of his characteristic approach to them."—Thomas R. Hart, University of Oregon

"The great thing about Candido is that he was a cultural theorist avant la lettre. In his own way, he defined cultural studies long before the field, as such, appeared. This originality, this inspired refusal to fit existing molds, this insistence on seeing literature as a social process (and social processes as inherently symbolic) still sets him apart. A broad array of scholars will benefit from this excellent selection of his work."—Candace Slater, University of California, Berkeley

"Antonio Candido's is a world culture embodied in a locally rooted sensibility. Written in Portuguese, this 'tomb of thought,' his work, which was a major influence on two generations of Brazilian scholars, will inspire Anglo-Saxon readers. They will admire Candido's elegantly sober style and his insights on the subtle relation between society and its literature. Literary critics, as much as authors, can truly be universal."—Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, University of Chicago