In her well-documented The Muffled Cries: The Writer and Literature in Authoritarian Brazil, 1964–1985, Nancy T. Baden offers a wealth of information feeding into two narrative sequences, namely the institutional trajectory of censorship in Brazil, and the fiction banned by or written in response to censorship. The two strands take turns in Baden’s chronologically organized chapters, in which she studies several contemporary Brazilian authors and presents information about the evolution of censorship in Brazil. This is supplemented by major authors’ reactions to it, as elicited in a questionnaire. Finally, Baden reproduces, as appendixes, the famous writers’ petition to Minister Falcão (1977) and important bio-bibliographic data on 31 Brazilian authors. The choice of authors included in this selection is based on how directly they were either censored or wrote in response to censorship, a criterion that also defines which pieces are analyzed.
The reader unfamiliar with recent Brazilian literature and...
