The present volume features an array of essays on some of Lí­dia Jorge's best-known fiction. Special attention is devoted here to A Costa dos Murmúrios, undoubtedly her most celebrated novel at home and abroad. The importance of its central theme–a personal recollection of colonial wartime in Mozambique that engages in dialogue with the highly fictionalized account featured at the outset of the book–would amply suffice to justify the interest it has elicited. But the original treatment which Lídia Jorge affords to her chosen theme enables her to problematize a wide range of issues close to the heart of modern readers (be they Portuguese or not), including personal and collective identity, memory, history, language, and representation itself. Here in the present volume, this novel is the focus of three pieces that develop incisive and insightful parameters of analysis focusing on the role of memory and the portrayal of women to cast a new light on this seminal text.

CLÁUDIA PAZOS ALONSO is a Lecturer in Portuguese and Brazlian Studies at the University of Oxford, England. She is the author of Imagens do Eu na Poesia de Florbela Espanca (Lisbon: INCM, 1997) and editor of Women, Literature and Culture in the Portuguese-Speaking World (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996). She has published articles on contemporary women writers, including Lídia Jorge, and on Brazilian writers José de Alencar and Rachel de Queiroz.