STANFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
  
Cover of Reading Rio de Janeiro by Zephyr Frank
Reading Rio de Janeiro
Literature and Society in the Nineteenth Century
Zephyr Frank


BUY THIS BOOK

2016
248 pages.
from $30.00

Hardcover ISBN: 9780804757447
Paperback ISBN: 9781503632929
Ebook ISBN: 9780804797306

Request Review/Desk/Examination Copy

CITATION

DescriptionDesc.
Reviews
Excerpts and More

Reading Rio de Janeiro blazes a new trail for understanding the cultural history of 19th-century Brazil. To bring the social fabric of Rio de Janeiro alive, Zephyr Frank flips the historian's usual interest in literature as a source of evidence and, instead, uses the historical context to understand literature. By focusing on the theme of social integration through the novels of José de Alencar, Machado de Assis, and Aluisio Azevedo, the author draws the reader's attention to the way characters are caught between conflicting moral imperatives as they encounter the newly mobile, capitalist, urban society, so different from the slave-based plantations of the past. Some characters grow and triumph in this setting; others are defeated by it. Though literature infuses this social history of 19th-century Rio, it is replete with maps, graphs, non-fiction sources, and statistical data and analysis that are the historian's stock-in-trade. By connecting a literary understanding of the social problems with the quantitative data traditional historical methods provide, Frank creates a richer and deeper understanding of society in 19th-century Rio.

About the author

Zephyr L. Frank is Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Dutra's World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro.

"The scholarship is deep, original, and the author addresses familiar topics in an entirely new and illuminating way. Reading Rio is a major contribution to knowledge.—Alida Metcalf, Rice University

"Stimulating and attractive—Frank perceptively uses history to understand literature."

—Richard Graham, The University of Texas at Austin