Kirjahaku

This study considers the ways Spanish American and Brazilian poets differ from their European counterparts by considering 'Latin American' as more than a perfunctory epithet. It sets the orthodox Latin tradition of the subcontinent against others that have survived or grown up after the conquest then pays attention to those poets who, from Independence, have striven to express a specifically American moral and geographical identity. Dr Brotherson focuses on Modernismo, or the 'coming of age' of poetry in Spanish America and Brazil, and the importance of the movements associated with it. He considers César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, probably the greatest of the selection, Octavio Paz, and modern poets who have reacted differently to the idea that Latin America might now be thought to have not just a geographical but a nascent political identity of its own. Poems are liberally quoted, and treated as entities in their own right.

A biographical and critical study of the Spanish poet Manuel Machado (1874–1947), who was highly thought of in his lifetime but who, since his death, declined in popularity. His brother, Antonio, whom he once overshadowed, became more widely read. The first half of the book is biographical, setting Machado against the general literary background in Spain, and estimating his debt to French influence. Dr Brotherston deals in some detail with the Modernista movement, so that the study is almost an account of Spanish literary life of the time. The second half of the book is critical; Dr Brotherston wishes to show the fine quality of certain poems, and to affirm Machado's real importance and distinction. The generous bibliography will be useful to readers closely concerned with Machado and his period.

This survey concentrates on the modern novel of Spanish-speaking America. Dr Brotherston starts with a long and suggestive introduction on the general topic 'settings and people', showing the growth of a sense of Latin American identity in the fiction produced in the continent as a whole. There follow detailed studies of individual modern novels, taken as representative of their time, their author, their country and the continent. A conclusion surveys and sums up these themes. The analytical studies of important and representative novels, related to each other in theme and preoccupation, the substantial quotations (in English), the notes and the useful bibliography, make this a book which gives students and other readers a well-considered introduction to the Spanish American fiction of this century.

The Book of the Fourth World offers detailed analyses of texts that range far back into the centuries of civilised life from what is now Latin- and Anglo-America. At the time of its 'discovery', the American continent was identified as the Fourth World of our planet. In the course of just a few centuries its original inhabitants, though settled there for millennia and countable in many millions, have come to be perceived as a marginal if not entirely dispensable factor in the continent's destiny. Today the term has been taken up again by its native peoples, to describe their own world: both its threatened present condition, and its political history, which stretches back thousands of years before Columbus. In order to explore the literature of this world, Brotherston uses primary sources that have traditionally been ignored because they have not conformed to Western definitions of oral and written literature, such as the scrolls of the Algonkin, the knotted strings (Quipus) of the Inca, Navajo dry-paintings and the encyclopedic pages of Meso-America's screenfold books.