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Brazil's literary narrative began to emerge only after the country's formal independence from Portugal in 1822, and it gained full force only in the second half of the nineteenth century. While generally accompanying the Western literary tradition's major trends and transformations, it has developed its own voice and matured into an important part of a rich and diverse national literature. It has not always received the international acclaim that has been accorded Spanish American literature, but that perhaps has less to do with quality than with the facts that it is written in Portuguese rather than Spanish and that translations have been rather slow in coming. It was not until the 1950s, for example, that turn-of-the-century writer Machado de Assis, whom Susan Sontag has described as 'the greatest author ever produced in Latin America', was translated into English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular culture is a term used to refer to a very broad and diverse array of forms and practices such as salsa, samba, religious ritual and magic, carnivals, telenovelas (television soaps), masks, pottery, weaving, alternative theatre, radio, video and oral narrative as well as the 'wholeway of life', the language, dress and political culture of subordinate classes and ethnic groups. It covers a whole spectrum of cultural practices, which are seen as lying outside the institutionalized and canonized forms of knowledge and aesthetic production generally defined as 'high' culture. These practices have in turn been studied within different disciplinary frameworks and variously defined as 'folk culture', 'mass culture', 'the culture industry' and 'working-class culture'. To gain an understanding of popular culture in Latin America is therefore a challenge to our sociological imagination: it entails examining particular cultural manifestations while simultaneously being aware of how the very object of study, and hence our knowledge of it, is framed in a certainway by a given intellectual tradition or disciplinary framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]