ABSTRACT
The thirty commentaries and close readings offered here in honour of Tom Earle — in the expectation that he will improve them, as Helder Macedo aptly observes in the introduction to his own commentary — cover all periods and main genres of literature in Portuguese. In so doing, they reflect Tom’s range of teaching expertise, for they fall into two large groups, representing pre-modern and modern Portuguese literature respectively, and a smaller one, devoted to modern Brazilian literature, included here to acknowledge the fact that Tom regarded Brazilian literature a core component of the Oxford syllabus and indeed taught it himself for almost three decades.
