Stories on a String

Candace Slater's Stories on a String: The Brazilian Literatura de Cordel introduces readers to one of the most vibrant yet understudied traditions of popular literature in the modern world. Rooted in the centuries-old Iberian ballad and chapbook heritage but transformed within the cultural, linguistic, and historical context of Northeastern Brazil, the cordel-or folheto-emerged as the primary reading material of working-class communities. These verse pamphlets, sold in marketplaces and performed by poets, combine news, legend, social critique, and fantasy. Slater situates the cordel within Brazil's broader cultural landscape, demonstrating its central role not only as entertainment but also as a vehicle of collective memory and commentary on historical events, politics, religion, and daily struggles. Drawing upon more than a thousand texts and extensive fieldwork, she reveals how these deceptively modest "stories on a string" shaped and reflected the lives of millions of Brazilians.

The book also foregrounds the cordel's influence on twentieth-century Brazilian intellectual and artistic life, tracing its impact on figures ranging from Jorge Amado to Ariano Suassuna, and examining how middle-class and elite audiences have increasingly appropriated and reinterpreted this once-marginal form. Slater's analysis balances structural readings of recurring narrative patterns with close attention to performance contexts, poet-audience interactions, and the shifting meanings of the tradition in an era of modernization and mass media. Combining literary scholarship, cultural history, and ethnography, Stories on a String makes a compelling case for the cordel as both a deeply rooted folk practice and a dynamic, evolving art form central to understanding Brazil's social fabric.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.