Rhian Atkin

This book constitutes the most detailed and wide-ranging comparative study to date of how European literatures written in less well known languages try, through translation, to reach the wider world. Through case studies of over thirteen different national contexts as diverse as Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Dutch, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Serbian, it explores patterns and contrasts in approaches to supply-driven translation, cultural diplomacy, institutional support and international gate-keeping, while examining the particular fates of poetry, women’s writing and genre fiction, and the opportunities arising from trans-medial circulation, self-translation and translingualism and a more radical critique of power balances in the translation and publishing industries. Its comparative approach challenges both the narratives of uniqueness that arise from discrete national approaches and the narrative of tragic marginalization that prevails in world literary approaches. Instead, it uses an interdisciplinary mix of literary, historical, sociological, gender- and translation-studies approaches to illuminate the often pioneering, innovative thinking and strategies that mark these literatures as they take on the inequalities of globalization.

Digression is a crucial motif in literary narratives. It features as a key characteristic of fictional works from Cervantes and Sterne, to Proust, Joyce and Calvino. Moving away from a linear narrative and following a path of associations reflects how we think and speak. Yet an author’s inability to stick to the point has often been seen to detract from a work of literature, somehow weakening it. This wide-ranging and timely volume seeks to celebrate narrative digressions and move towards a theoretical framework for studying the meanderings of literary texts as a useful and valuable aspect of literature. Essays discussing some of the possibilities for approaching narrative digression from a theoretical perspective are complemented with focused studies of European and American authors. As a whole, the book offers a broad and varied view of textual wanderings.

Saramago's labyrinths is the first book-length study to focus on the relationship between form and the content in Saramago's writing, paying particular attention to Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness) and Todos os Nomes (All the Names). Atkin provides a close textual analysis of Blindness and All the Names, and suggests that the labyrinth pervades Saramago's work, both in the form of the text, and as a literary and philosophical trope. She makes clear connections between these novels and Saramago's other literary works, and identifies ways in which Saramago causes the reader to return to and consider the philosophical, epistemological and ethical concerns and dilemmas that are recurrent in his literary output. Atkin's jargon-free approach to Saramago's complex ideas, and her thorough understanding of Portuguese history, culture and society, make this an accessible yet challenging guide to Saramago's fiction, for undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars with or without prior knowledge of the Portuguese context.

Twentieth-century Portugal saw dramatic political and social change. The monarchy was abolished, and a republic installed (1910), soon giving way to a long-lasting dictatorship (1926); a transition to democracy (1974) led to membership of the European Union (1986). But what do we know of how people lived during these periods? And how did men, in particular, respond to the changes taking place in society? In this illuminating and broad-ranging study, Rhian Atkin uses as case studies the work of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), Luís de Sttau Monteiro (1926-93) and José Saramago (1922-2010) in order to examine the relationship between socio-political change and the construction and performance of masculinities in the urban environment of Lisbon over the course of the last century.

This article examines the ways in which the cuisine of the Portuguese diaspora in the USA comes to represent the ethnic heritage of those who produce it, both as the food that holds connotations of home, and the food that allows them to perform their identity as Portuguese-Americans. The article focuses mainly on the work of two cookbook authors: Maria Lawton and David Leite. It analyses how specific culinary techniques, such as those used to make the onion, oil and garlic base for many dishes, which is known in Portuguese as the refogado, may reveal tensions between cultural identities, practices and values. It explores how the materiality of food and specific dishes are used by cooks to negotiate memory, emotions and cultural identity.

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s 1966 novella Os Armários Vazios [‘The Empty Closets’] explores the experiences of several women who are united by the man who divides them: Ernesto Laje. This study will analyse how the first-person narrator of the novel, Manuela Lewis, both reveals and obscures the restrictions faced by three generations of women as they attempt to navigate their ambitions and give voice to their emotions, with their individual, subjective experiences being subordinated to the deceptive authority of a narrator who alternates between participation in the events described and distance from them. Despite Ernesto Laje’s apparent centrality to the plot, we interpret Carvalho’s text as a polyphony of stories (some told, some left untold but hinted at), all bound together by the isolation of their (female) protagonists, combining to produce a complex array of intertwining perspectives which belie the apparently straightforward nature of the narrative presented.

In the present article, I analyze discourses of masculinity and the male body associated with Portugal’s involvement in World War I. I examine these from three perspectives: the national military body; medical and political discussion of disabled bodies; and soldiers’ stories about their own experiences. I draw on the popular press, published memoirs, and government and institutional documents to examine the fluid and shifting accounts of masculinity, disability, and heroism during and just after the war. I argue that representations of heroism in this context are directly linked to the male body; furthermore, they are both variable and constructed to serve specific ideological or personal purposes. More broadly, I conclude that the body in war and disabled by war comes to stand for Portugal’s experiences as a nation at the Western Front, and in the process makes invisible the individual bodies of men who fought for their country.

This article seeks to assess questions of vision, power, and sexual desire in the relationship between the gazed-upon object and the gazing subject in Jorge de Sena’s 1966 novella O Físico Prodigioso. It argues that the constantly shifting narrative focus of the text permits the reader to move beyond the gender-coded and unidirectional gaze relationship outlined by Mulvey, and thus break down the binaries of male–female, gazer–gazee, and powerful–powerless which traditionally dominate our conceptions of sexual and political power relations. The article proposes that O Físico Prodigioso presents a textual working through of the multiple, partial perspectives that Haraway lauds as an alternative to male-coded objectivity, where diverse perspectives and visual exchange are crucial to personal sexual relationships and to political resistance.

This article examines Jorge de Sena’s interrogation of power and resistance in O Físico Prodigioso (1966). While the second half of the novella functions as a clear allegory for the Portuguese and Brazilian dictatorships of the mid-twentieth century, political oppression and repression are in fact deeply ingrained in Sena’s vision of society. The apparent freedom that is witnessed before and after dictatorship is not (and cannot be) universal, because for Sena even the power of discourse holds the potential for oppression. Drawing on Foucault’s work, the article posits that O Físico Prodigioso’s shifting narrative functions as a call for continual resistance against oppression in all of its forms.

The Livro do desassossego is 'written' by Fernando Pessoa's semi-heteronym, Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who lives and works in Lisbon. The present article takes the concept of flânerie (the art of wandering aimlessly through the city's streets) as a point of entry for an analysis of the Livro do desassossego, with a view to reaching a greater understanding of Soares's relationship to his urban environment and his subjective experience of the city. Throughout his book, Soares endorses a philosophy of inaction as a form of resistance to the changes of modernity that he witnesses around him, and his gaze inevitably turns inwards. Through a detailed reading of selected fragments, I identify the features that mark Soares as an introspective flâneur whose real focus is not the city of Lisbon, but himself.

Taking as an interpretive model the classical concept of the labyrinth, this article analyses the relationship between plot and narrative technique in José Saramago's novel Todos os Nomes (1997). Based on a close reading of the novel, which describes the protagonist's attempt to find an 'unknown woman', the article examines the author's (or narrator's) narrative strategies. These include misleading statements by the narrator, mixing 'real' events with anticipated, speculative, and purely imagined occurrences, thereby compelling the reader to constantly reread and reconsider what has been said in an attempt to understand the text. In this way, it is argued, Saramago offers a unity of form and content that forces the reader to participate in the construction of meaning. Tomando como modelo interpretativo o conceito clássico do labirinto, este estudo analisa a relação entre enredo e técnica narrativa no romance Todos os Nomes (1997) de José Saramago. A partir de uma leitura aprofundada do romance, que trata da busca pelo protagonista de uma mulher desconhecida, o artigo examina as estratégias narrativas do autor/narrador. Estas compreendem despistagens intencionais por parte do narrador, que baralha acontecimentos reais com outros incidentes antecipados, conjecturais, ou puramente imaginados, obrigando assim que o leitor releia e reveja constantemente o que está escrito no seu esforço de compreender o texto. Desta maneira Saramago consegue uma unidade de forma e conteúdo que impele o leitor a participar na construção da significação do texto.