Roberto Schwarz's To the Victor, the Potatoes! is one of the great works of comparative literature. It belongs on a shelf with Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, Georg Lukács's The Historical Novel, Edward Said's Orientalism, and a handful of others. Unfortunately, few English-reading scholars will discover this for themselves, for the justifiable reason that it consists mainly in a careful analysis of four bad books, all from nineteenth-century Brazil. For this reason, my remarks will be both more summary and longer than might ordinarily be desirable in a review.

“Bad book[s]” is Schwarz's own phrase (126).1 But his analysis is not indifferent to quality, nor is it methodologically agnostic on questions of literary value. To the contrary: To the Victor is about four novels that are determinate failures: works whose means and intended ends...

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