Paradise City, Gringa and Playboy
- Submitting institution
-
University of Hertfordshire
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 24683142
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Arcadia Books
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- September
- Year
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The São Paulo trilogy is a single work made up of three distinct novels, totalling approximately 220,000 words. Research involved experimentation in a wide range of literary forms, and the synthesis of primary sources changing in real time. The trilogy is a work of fiction based on fact, recognisable in terms of certain names, places, statistics, institutions, events, laws, and policy. Thomas lived in São Paulo for ten years; this experience accounts for much of the information, and anecdotes, in the novels. Friends, colleagues, associates, and contemporary media outlets all informed the writing of the novels, both directly and indirectly.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Thomas conceived of the trilogy as one work, three novels unified by a linear history of São Paulo, a thread of factual events, political and socio-economic changes: the Mensalão scandal, the Singapore Construction Project, the 2014 World Cup, the Lavajato scandal, the violent protests of 2016, and the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. The trilogy reveals the dark heart of the Brazilian social-democrat resurgence and the fragility and corruption of the B.R.I.C economic miracle; it documents the rise and fall of the left-wing – and the rise of the populist right.
The three parts enable a shift in style and structure with each novel, representing the research process: Paradise City is narrated in the third-person by a single character in a linear chronology; Gringa includes multiple perspectives, fragmented timelines and fractured narratives; Playboy blends real testimony, and documents a real protest movement within a fictional, white-collar crime narrative, developing the structural research of Gringa and highlighting social inequalities and how they exist within the discourses of power.
Thomas’s research examines transnational concepts that underpin literature of the city. He is drawn to fiction of immersive intensity and the blending of voices and forms; predominantly fracturing narratives as an effective means of writing the city. A unifying factor is an interrogation of the discourses of power. The urban topographies of the novels, and their complex intertextual relationship to other crime writing are strategies for articulating an ethics and an aesthetics that critiques power.
Gringa received an award from Arts Council England; Playboy received a K Blundell Trust award for ‘authors…whose work aims to increase social awareness’ and ‘contribute to the greater understanding of existing social and economic organisations’. The trilogy is critically acclaimed: ‘Brilliant’ The Times; ‘Wonderfully vivid’ Mail on Sunday; ‘Sophisticated, dizzying’ GQ; ‘Feverish energy’ Guardian.
ISBNs 9781910050972, 9781911350248, 9781911350613
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -