Foreword

Abstract

I take this opportunity to thank the librarians at the libraries I visited while conducting the research on which this book is based, at the Fondo Reservado, in the Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico City, the Biblioteca Nacional in Bogotá, Colombia, the Bodleian, Oxford, the University Library, Cambridge, the British Library, London (and particularly Barry Taylor), the Stetson Collection in the University of Florida Library, and the National Libraries in Buenos Aires, Lima and Rio de Janeiro. Special thanks to my former colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Italian, University of Kentucky, whose willingness to discuss some of the concepts explored in the first edition of this book helped me to make fewer errors than would otherwise have been the case, and allowed me to appreciate the value of Colonial literature which, by and large, is not studied in Britain. I also express my gratitude here to those scholars who guided me in the preparation of this second edition. Thanks are due to Jason Wilson for advice about recent developments in Latin American literature, to João Cezar de Castro Rocha, John Gledson, David Treece, Claire Williams, Aquiles Alencar Brayner and Else Vieira, for their advice on trends in contemporary Brazilian literature, and especially to Maria Aparecida Ferreira de Andrade Salgueiro for her hospitality during my research trip to Rio de Janeiro in the spring of 2006. I am grateful to the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, and to João Candido Portinari, President of the Portinari Project for permission to reproduce Portinari's Coffee as the jacket illustration. I gratefully acknowledge the support of my research trip to work in the archives of the National Library in Rio provided by the University of London Central Fund, the UCL Graduate School, the Arts and Humanities Dean's Fund and the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies. Thanks too are in order for the generous assistance of the editorial team at Boydell and Brewer, especially Ellie Ferguson. Lastly, I thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript whose wisdom saved me from many an error; the others, of course, are mine.