Gender, Discourse, and Desire in Twentieth-Century Brazilian Women's Literature / Cristina Ferreira-Pinto.

• Author: Pinto, Cristina Ferreira, 1960-
• Year of Publication: 2004
• Language: English
• Series: Purdue studies in Romance literatures ; v. 29
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xiv, 208 p. )
• Notes: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

"This study by Cristina Ferreira-Pinto explores the poetic and narrative strategies twentieth-century Brazilian women writers use to achieve new forms of representation of the female body, sexuality, and desire. Female writers discussed include: Gilka Machado, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Marcia Denser, and Marina Colasanti. While creating new forms, these writers are also deconstructing cultural myths of femininity and female behavior. In order to understand these myths, the book also presents new readings of some male-authored canonical novels by Jose de Alencar, Machado de Assis, Manuel Autonio de Almeida, and Aluisio Azevedo."

"In the discussion of the strategies Brazilian female poets and fiction writers employ, Ferreira-Pinto addresses some social and cultural issues that relate to a woman's sense of her own body and sexuality: the characterization of women based on racial features and class hierarchy; marriage; motherhood; the silencing of the lesbian subject; and aging. Ferreria-Pinto's analysis is informed by the works of various and diverse critics and theoreticians, among them Helene Cixous, Teresa De Lauretis, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldua, Georges Bataille, and Wilhelm Reich."--Jacket.

Table of Contents

Brazilian women in society and literature: a chronology. -- Brazilian women's literature as a counterideological discourse. -- Female body, male desire. -- Brazilian women writers: the search for an erotic discourse. -- Representation of the female body and desire: the Gothic, the fantastic, and the grotesque. -- Sonia Coutinho's short fiction: aging and the female body. -- Contemporary Brazilian women's short stories: lesbian desire. -- The works of Márcia Denser and Marina Colasanti: female agency and heterosexuality. -- Brazilian women writers in the new millennium. -- Appendix: English translations.