This book examines the role and influence of the classics in the process of Brazilian national identity construction. Brazil's discourse about race, national and collective identities – neither European, nor African, nor yet indigenous, but all three – has shaped its mythologies and literatures. Andrea Kouklanakis analyses and assesses the deployment of the classics in the formation and representation of the national character with an emphasis on the works of Black and mixed-race writers.

Classics, Race and Identity in Brazil focuses on literature and anthropology (including its branches in law and medicine) produced between the 19th and mid-20th centuries. This study shows that the different uses of the classics reveal complicated attitudes towards what constitutes 'Brazilianness', conceived as a three-race national formation coexistent with racist ideologies. Critical writers examined in this volume range from Luís Gama (1830-1882), Machado de Assis (1839-1908) and Castro Alves (1847-1871) to Abdias Nascimento (1914-2011) and Domício Proença Filho (1936-present). Kouklanakis provides a major case study of classical reception and race beyond the anglophone world, and considers sociological and anthropological views in her examination of the classical presence in the formation of Brazilian identity.