A Canon of Empty Fathers Paternity in Portuguese Narrative

A Canon of Empty Fathers: Paternity in Portuguese Narrative is the first book-length study that analyzes the repeated and peculiar deployment of the father figure in Portuguese narratives from the nineteenth century to the present day. In it, Phillip Rothwell argues for a specifically Portuguese tendency toward what he terms empty paternity - a corruption of the Lacanian paternal function that has surfaced continuously in Portuguese culture from the fifteenth century onward.