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Author | John Updike |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
Publication date | 1994 |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 272 pp |
ISBN | 0-679-43071-7 |
OCLC | 28587188 |
813/.54 20 | |
LC Class | PS3571.P4 B48 1994 |
Brazil is a 1994 novel by the American author John Updike. It contains many elements of magical realism. It is a retelling of the ancient tale of Tristan and Isolde, the subject of many works in opera and ballet.
Tristão Raposo, a nineteen-year-old black child of the Rio de Janeiro slums, spies Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, across the hot sands of Copacabana Beach, and presents her with a ring stolen from an American tourist. Their flight into marriage takes them from urban banality to the farthest reaches of Brazil’s wild west, where magic still rules. Privation, violence, captivity and poverty afflict them; his mother curses them, her father strives to separate them, and neither lover is absolutely faithful. Eventually, ancient charms change him to white and her to black. Yet Tristão and Isabel hold on to the belief that each is the other’s fate for life, as they develop in ways they never thought possible.
Critic James Wood described it as 'full of soft writing'. [1]
Black is a color that results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. In Western society, black and white have often been used to describe opposites such as good and evil, the Dark Ages versus Age of Enlightenment, and night versus day. In Western society, since the Middle Ages, black has been the symbolic color of solemnity and authority, and for this reason it is still commonly worn by judges and magistrates.
Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is most commonly used for people of sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous Australians and Melanesians, though it has been applied in many contexts to other groups, and is no indicator of any close ancestral relationship whatsoever. Indigenous African societies do not use the term black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures.
Margaret Alice Murray was an Anglo-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist. The first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, she worked at University College London (UCL) from 1898 to 1935. She served as president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955, and published widely over the course of her career.
Storks are large, long-legged, long-necked wading birds with long, stout bills. They belong to the family called Ciconiidae, and make up the order Ciconiiformes. Ciconiiformes previously included a number of other families, such as herons and ibises, but those families have been moved to other orders.
Morus, a genus of flowering plants in the family Moraceae, consists of diverse species of deciduous trees commonly known as mulberries, growing wild and under cultivation in many temperate world regions. Generally, the genus has 64 subordinate taxa, three of which are well-known and are ostensibly named for the fruit color of the best-known cultivar: white, red, and black mulberry, with numerous cultivars and some taxa currently unchecked and awaiting taxonomic scrutiny. M. alba is native to South Asia, but is widely distributed across Europe, Southern Africa, South America, and North America. M. alba is also the species most preferred by the silkworm, and is regarded as an invasive species in Brazil and the United States.
The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry is considered black. It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.
The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people were killed, but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. In addition, two white people were killed in self-defense by one of the victims. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot. Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including the lynching of Charles Strong and the Perry massacre in 1922.
Charlotte Louise Bridges Grimké was an African American anti-slavery activist, poet, and educator. She grew up in a prominent abolitionist family in Philadelphia. She taught school for years, including during the Civil War, to freedmen in South Carolina. Later in life she married Francis James Grimké, a Presbyterian minister who led a major church in Washington, DC, for decades. He was a nephew of the abolitionist Grimké sisters and was active in civil rights.
DonaIsabel, nicknamed "the Redemptress", was the Princess Imperial of the Empire of Brazil and the Empire's regent on three occasions. Born in Rio de Janeiro as the eldest daughter of Emperor Pedro II of Brazil and Empress Teresa Cristina, she was a member of the Brazilian branch of the House of Braganza. After the deaths of her two brothers in infancy, she was recognized as her father's heiress presumptive. She married a French prince, Gaston, Count of Eu, in an arranged marriage and they had three sons.
Maria Isabel of Braganza was a Portuguese infanta who became Queen of Spain as the second wife of King Ferdinand VII.
City of the Beasts is the first young adult novel by Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende. Published in 2002, the story is set in the Amazon rainforest. The novel was translated by Margaret Sayers Peden from Spanish to English. Walden Media acquired the novel's movie rights in 2006 but no film has yet been produced.
"Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" is the English common name representative of a very large class of European ballads.
Maria Isabella of Spain was Queen of the Two Sicilies from 4 January 1825 until 8 November 1830 as the wife of Francis I of the Two Sicilies.
The Confederation of the Equator was a short-lived rebellion that occurred in the northeastern region of the Empire of Brazil in 1824, in the early years of the country's independence from Portugal. The secessionist movement was led by liberals who opposed the authoritarian and centralist policies of the nation's first leader, Emperor Pedro I. The fight occurred in the provinces of Pernambuco, Ceará and Paraíba.
James Cordie Cheek was a 17-year-old African-American youth who was lynched by a white mob in Maury County, Tennessee near the county seat of Columbia. After being falsely accused of attempting to rape a young white girl, Cheek was released from jail when the grand jury did not indict him, due to lack of evidence. The county magistrate and two other men from Maury County abducted Cheek from Nashville, where he was staying with relatives near Fisk University, took him back to the county, and turned him over to a lynch mob. The mob mutilated Cheek and murdered him by hanging. A grand jury declined to indict anyone for the murder of Cheek.
The House of Orléans-Braganza is by legitimacy, the imperial house of Brazil formed in 1864, with the marriage of the heir to the Brazilian throne, Isabel of Braganza with Prince Gaston, Count of Eu. The House of Orléans-Braganza never reigned, as Brazil's pure Braganza monarch, Emperor Pedro II being deposed in a military coup d'état, under the pressure of the civilian republicans, in 1889. However, with the death of Isabel in 1921, as the last Brazilian pure Braganza, her descendants inherited the dynastic rights of the Brigantine dynasty over the defunct Brazilian throne.
Portuguese maritime exploration resulted in the numerous territories and maritime routes recorded by the Portuguese as a result of their intensive maritime journeys during the 15th and 16th centuries. Portuguese sailors were at the vanguard of European exploration, chronicling and mapping the coasts of Africa and Asia, then known as the East Indies, and Canada and brazil, in what came to be known as the Age of Discovery.
Isabel de Forz was the eldest daughter of Baldwin de Redvers, 6th Earl of Devon (1217–1245). On the death of her brother Baldwin de Redvers, 7th Earl of Devon, in 1262, without children, she inherited suo jure the earldom and also the feudal barony of Plympton in Devon, and the lordship of the Isle of Wight. After the early death of her husband and her brother, before she was thirty years old, she inherited their estates and became one of the richest women in England, living mainly in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, which she held from the king as tenant-in-chief.
The Black Guard of the Redemptress was a paramilitary secret society in Rio de Janeiro composed of Brazilian former African slaves freed on May 13, 1888, by the signature of the Golden Law by Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil.
HMS Avon, later renamed NRP Nuno Tristão, was a River-class frigate of the Royal Navy (RN). Avon was built to the RN's specifications as a Group II River-class frigate. She served in the North Atlantic during World War II.