This talk is an excerpt of a monograph on the poetry of the Brazilian colonial period and its reception of antiquity, titled “Arcadia Ultramarina: Studies in the Neoclassical Literature of Portuguese America.” The talk considers statements of poetic primacy in the two epics produced under the umbrella of 18th century Brazilian Arcadianism, each of which narrativizes key moments in the Portuguese settlement of Brazil. I argue that both epics conceive of poetic primacy as an adaptation of colonial concepts of ‘newness’ and in consideration of the crisis in European thinking ignited by the apparent lacunae in ancient geographic knowledge concerning the so-called New World. I additionally consider the intermediary of Camões’s The Lusiads as instrumental to the formalization of a lexicon of poetic primacy in the Arcadian epics.
About the Speaker
Adriana Vazquez is an assistant professor of Classics at UCLA specializing in Latin literature of the Augustan period, with particular interest in its legacy in the Lusophone literature of the 17th- and 18th-centuries. She is currently working on a monograph on the legacy of Latin literature in the poetry of colonial Brazil, titled Arcadia Ultramarina: Studies in the Neoclassical Literature of Portuguese America, which analyzes the literary output of the poets of the Arcadia Ultramarina, a literary academy which emerged in colonial Brazil, for its dialoguing with the ancient poetic tradition. She has published articles on topics ranging from religious language in Augustan poetry to the legacy of Virgil in Portuguese epic and Brazilian poetry. She is a cofounder and former steering committee member of Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-hispanic World, an interest group focusing on Ibero-global reception.
Supported by CANES and the University Lectures Committee with co-sponsorships from the Center for Early Modern Studies and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.
