The relationship between music and poetry is typical of early Cape Verdean poetry; one thinks, for example, of the mornas/poems by Eugénio Tavares. This sort of poetry existed side-by-side with the emphatically classi-cist poetry that imitated the rhetorical models of the mother-country's canon, an example being the poetry of José Lopes, to whom Arminda Brito dedicates an article in the first section of this edition.

The present volume has brought together the contributions of scholars of different nationalities who have dedicated themselves to a study of the literatures in the Portuguese language, as well as those who work in other areas such as Linguistics or Comparative Literature but who have in recent years researched and published works on Cape Verdean literature. These include not only Cape Verdeans but also scholars writing from Brazil, Portugal, the United States, the United Kingdom and Galicia in Spain.