With his works currently translated into thirty-three languages, Jorge Amado is undoubtedly Brazil's best-known author abroad, a fact that, ironically, has had both positive and negative repercussions at home: on the one hand, Amado is a tremendously popular writer with a long record of advocacy on behalf of Brazil's economically disadvantaged and marginalized peoples; on the other, he has been accused of sexism and sexual stereotyping, of utilizing too many scenes of excessive violence against women, of romanticizing poverty, and of perpetuating what have been described as paternalistic racial views. But no one can deny the importance of Jorge Amado's contribution to modern Brazilian narrative, where his skills and charm as a storyteller merge Brazil's oral tradition with its written. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with whom he is compared, Amado knows how to make the local or particular express the universal.

In Jorge Amado: New Critical Essays, sixteen of the world's leading Latin American Studies scholars provide a comprehensive survey of Amado's works, addressing his religion and his revolution, his portrayals of women, his place in postmodern reconstruction, and his legacy in Brazil.

Keith Brower is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Salisbury State University. Enrique Martinez-Vidal is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College.

Introduction 1. Religion and Revolution: The Allegorical Subtexts of Capitaes da areia 2. Ambiguity Lost: Jorge Amado's A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro Dagua 3. Stirking a Balance: Amado and the Critics 4. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon: Rewriting the Discourse of the Native 4. Malandro Heaven: Amado's Utopian Vision 5. Bitter Harvest: Violent Oppression in Cacau and Terra do sem fim 6. Dressing Down the Warrior Maiden: Plot, Perspective and Gender Ideology in Tereza Batista cansada de guerra 7. the Vox Populi in the Novels of Jorge Amado and John Steinbeck 8. A Character in Spite of Her Author: Dona Flor Liberates Herself from Jorge Amado 9. Jorge Amado and the Classical Tradition Aristonphanes in Bahia 10. Jorge and Zelia Amado's Long Visit to the Pennsylvania State university in 1971: Surprise and Success 11. The Early Jorge Amado 12. From Lundu and Modinha to Samba de Enredo and MPB: Popular Music and the Fiction of Jorge Amado 13. Questioning Jorge Amado's Fictional Women of Color: Tereza Batista as Herione or Victim 14. O Sumico da Santa (The War of the Saints) : A Postmodern Reconstruction of Racial Dynamics in Contemporary Bahian Society 15. A Postcolonial Reading of a Colonized Malandro 16. Hybridity vs. Pluralism: Culture, Race, and Aesthetics in Jorge Amado 17. The Immanent Imp: Humor in the Later Works of Jorge Amado