A little about Brazilian Literature

Introduction

Brazilian Literature, writings in the Portuguese language produced by inhabitants of Brazil. Three ethnic groups have contributed to the shaping of this literature: Native Americans; transplanted Europeans; and blacks, whose ancestors were brought from Africa as slaves.

I. Colonial Period (16^th - 18^th century)

The literature of the colonial period is rich in historical and geographical descriptions. The exploration of Brazil, the wars incidental to its conquest by Portugal, and the early settlement by Portuguese and other Europeans form the major themes of the early writings. The first literary works based on the conquest were chronicles and epic poems. Bahia enjoyed distinction as the first literary center of the country. Noted writers included:

Jesuit priest Antônio VIEIRA (1608-97) and

satirist Gregório de MATTOS GUERRA (1633-96).

By the second half of the 18th century, literary predominance passed from Bahia to the vigorous mining area of Minas Gerais. Several epics originated there, including:

Uruguay (1769) by José BASÍLIO DA GAMA(1740-95) and

Sea Dragon by Friar José de SANTA RITTA DURÃO
(approximately 1737-84).

II. National Period (19^th - 20^th century)

Literary tendencies of the European continent continued to be reflected in 19th-century Brazilian literature, while some writers focused on the Brazilian sertão (inland plateau) and the selva (Amazon jungle). Romanticism was brought to Brazil from France by:

Domingos José GONÇALVES DE MAGALHÃES (1811-82), who is credited with giving to Brazilian verse new and freer forms that further distinguished it from Portuguese verse;

another noted romantic poet was Antônio GONÇALVES DIAS (1823-64), who also compiled a Dictionary of the Tupi Language (1858);

Other 19th-century Brazilian poets include:

Antônio ÁLVARES DE AZEVEDO (1831-52),

Olavo BILAC (1865-1918),

Raimundo CORREIA (1860-1911), and

Alberto de OLIVEIRA (1857-1937).

The most important novelist of the 19th century was:

Joaquim Maria MACHADO DE ASSIS (1839-1908), whose many novels are distinguished for their psychological penetration;

novelist José de ALENCAR (1829-1877) wrote about Native American themes;

while 19th-century novelists Bernardo da SILVA GUIMARÃES (1825-84) and

Euclides da CUNHA (1866-1909) chronicled life in the Brazilian backlands;

two novelists who set the stage for realism and naturalism in Brazilian literature were Manuel Antônio de ALMEIDA (1831-61) and

Alfredo d'ESCRAGNOLLE, visconde TAUNAY (1843-99);




the first authentic naturalistic author was ALUÍZIO AZEVEDO (1857-1913).

African influences and the theme of slavery have played an important role in the work of Brazil's many black writers, including renowned poet João da Cruz e Sousa (1861-98). Jorge de Lima (1893-1953) was one of the most prolific poets of the 20th century. Two other outstanding poets were:

Manuel BANDEIRA (1886-1968) and




Carlos DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE (1902-87), also a popular dramatist;




João Cabral de MELO NETO (1920-99) rooted his verse in native folklore tradition.

Twentieth-century Brazilian novelists include:

José Lins do RÊGO (1901-57),




Érico VERÍSSIMO (1905-75),




João GUIMARÃES ROSA (1908-67),




Jorge AMADO (1912-2001), and

Clarice LISPECTOR (1925-77);

and dramatists include:

Carlos DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE (1902-87) and

Ariano SUASSUNA (b. 1927).

A Brazilian literary identity

A branch of Portuguese literature from the 16th to the early 19th century, Brazilian literature began to acquire its own identity only after 1822, when Brazil severed political ties with Portugal. Through World War II, the model for Brazilian letters was French literature. Literary schools, therefore, followed French patterns: first romanticism, then realism, symbolism, and finally - after a transitional period between approximately 1900 and 1920 - avant-garde modernism.

• Antônio Francisco LISBOA, b. 1738, d. 1814, known as "O Aleijadinho" ("Little Cripple"), was the most renowned sculptor and architect of the Brazilian rococo period. He was the illegitimate son of the Portuguese architect Manuel Francisco Lisboa and a black slave called Isabel. At the age of 39 he contracted a disease that crippled him and left him without the use of his hands; thereafter he worked with a hammer and chisel strapped to his arms. His best work was done in his maturity. As an architect he is most noted for the design of the church of Sao Francisco de Assis in Ouro Preto, for which he also carved most of the interior decoration. His sculptural masterpiece is the series of 12 stone prophets and 6 polychromed wood scenes of the Passion of Christ, which he executed in 1800-05. These are installed in six chapels flanking the approach to the church of Bom Jesus de Matozinhos in Congonhas do Campo (Minas Gerais).

• Antônio GONÇALVES DIAS, b. Aug. 10, 1823, d. Nov. 3, 1864, is regarded as Brazil's national poet, and his Song of Exile (1843), with its evocative first line, "My land has palm trees," is that country's best-known poem. Educated in Portugal at the University of Coimbra, he wrote of love and of his country in Primeiros Cantos (First Songs, 1846), Segundos Cantos (Second Songs, 1848), and Últimos Cantos (Last Songs, 1851). The unfinished Indian epic, Os Tambiras (1857), and a dictionary of the Tupi language (1858) reflect his interest in ethnology. Acting on behalf of the government, he surveyed the school system in North Brazil and participated in a scientific expedition to the Upper Amazon Valley. He was returning to Brazil from Europe when he died in a shipwreck.

• Joaquim NABUCO DE ARAÚJO, b. Aug. 19, 1849, d. Jan. 17, 1910, a Brazilian writer and diplomat, was a leader in the fight to abolish slavery in Brazil. He helped secure a partial and gradual emancipation bill in 1871, founded the Brazilian Antislavery Society in 1880, and wrote extensively about slavery, which was finally abolished in Brazil in 1888. Although a monarchist, Nabuco served the Brazilian republic as ambassador to the United States (1905-10). Among his writings are an autobiography (1900) and Abolitionism: The Brazilian Anti-Slavery Struggle (1883; Eng. trans., 1977).

• José Martiniano de ALENCAR b. May. 1, 1829, d. Dec. 12, 1877), Brazilian playwright, journalist, lawyer, and politician, best known as a pioneer of modern Brazilian literature. Alencar was born in Mecejana (Messejana), Brazil. In 1857 he published the novel O Guarani, which established his reputation and popularity as a writer and introduced the Indianista genre of Brazilian fiction. Indianista novels typically describe the life, language, and customs of the indigenous Brazilian peoples known as Amerindians. Alencar believed that Brazil should forge a new language and literature to differentiate its cultural tradition from that of Portugal. In his writings, he reworked words from the Amerindian Tupi language and changed sentence structure to form what he considered a proper Brazilian form of Portuguese.

• Joaquim Maria MACHADO DE ASSIS, b. June 21, 1839, d. Sept. 29, 1908, Brazil's most revered writer and the founder, in 1896, and first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of a black father and a Portuguese mother who received scant education before entering the printer's trade and then becoming a journalist. Although Machado wrote poetry, drama, chronicles, criticism, and political works, he was known above all for his novels and short stories depicting life in Rio de Janeiro during the Second Empire (1822-89). His most successful works are rooted in the European tradition. Sometimes compared to Henry James, he focuses on universal humanity in his profound and ingenious analyses. Because for Machado life was a tragic dream, his writings are underlined by pessimism, bitterness, and a melancholic tone, all disguised by an ironical humor, as in his novels: Epitaph of a Small Winner (1881; Eng. trans., 1952) - a first-person, digressive narrative using the techniques of free association, Philosopher or Dog? (1891) and his greatest work, Dom Casmurro (1900; Eng. trans., 1953). What predominates in his pages, however, are the aesthetic values, and it was for the subtlety and power he brought to his art that Machado gained international recognition. He is considered a master of the short story, collections of which were published in translation as The Psychiatrist and Other Stories (1963) and The Devil's Church and Other Stories (1977).

• Critics and literary historians generally agree that the Brazilian Joaquim Maria MACHADO DE ASSIS (1839-1908) was the outstanding Latin American novelist of the 19th century. Machado was the first major Brazilian writer to experiment with language and structure, beginning a tradition of openness to the avant-garde that continues to this day. Modernism shaped Brazilian letters in the period before World War II, and, like similar movements in Europe, it turned to folk sources for material and used the vernacular as its language. The leading exponent of modernism was Mário de Morais ANDRADE (1893-1945), whose great novel Macunaíma (1928) is considered its outstanding example.

• A novelist, poet, literary and art critic, musicologist, and teacher, Mário de Morais ANDRADE, b. Sept. 9, 1893, d. Feb. 25, 1945, was a leading cultural figure in the modernist movement in Brazil. His book of poetry, Hallucinated City (1922; Eng. trans., 1968), can be considered a manifesto of a literary trend toward popularizing art. His dynamic leadership and his enormous influence led Andrade to be called the "Pope of Modernism." Several of his short stories and Macunaima (1928), his most famous prose work, are considered masterpieces.

• The anthropologist and historian Gilberto FREYRE, b. Mar. 15, 1900, d. Jul. 18, 1987, in such social histories as The Masters and the Slaves (1933; Eng. trans., 1946), had a significant influence, especially on writers of Brazil's Northeast region. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956; Eng. trans., 1963), by the great novelist João GUIMARÃES ROSA (1908-67) is a regional novel and one of the first contemporary Latin American literary works to achieve international acclaim. The novels of Jorge AMADO (1912-2001), one of Brazil's most popular writers (for example, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, 1966, Eng. trans., 1969) are also widely translated.

• A major force in modern Brazilian literature, João GUIMARÃES ROSA, b. June 27, 1980, d. Nov. 19, 1967, practiced medicine in the sertão (inland plateau), the sparsely populated hinterland where he had been born, before becoming a diplomat in the Brazilian foreign service. The sertão, however, remained the background for his fiction, which includes several volumes of short stories--notably Sagarana (1946; Eng. trans., 1966) and The Third Bank of the River (1962; Eng. trans., 1968). It was his monumental novel The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956; Eng. trans., 1963), however, that brought him international fame and that sustains his reputation today.

• Brazilian novelist Jorge AMADO, b. Aug. 10, 1912, d. Aug. 6, 2001, was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1961. Amado depicts life in his native state of Bahia at the beginning of the century, when wealthy cacao planters dominated the land, as in Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon (1958; Eng. trans., 1962). In Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966; Eng. trans., 1969) his characters gain greater individuality. A genuine sympathy for the humble and the socially downtrodden pervades his writing. This, in addition to his lyricism, imagination, and warm sense of humor, has given him an enormous reputation in Brazil and abroad. Two early novels, Jubiabá (1935) and Sea of Death (1936), were published in English translation in 1984, and several other works from the same period appeared in English translation in 1988.

• The modernist Brazilian writer Érico VERÍSSIMO, b. Dec. 17, 1905, d. Nov. 28, 1975, chronicled the rise of his native state Rio Grande do Sul in his masterpiece, the trilogy Time and the Wind, comprising The Continent (1949; Eng. trans., 1951), The Portrait (1951; Eng. trans., 1951), and O Arquipélago (The Archipelago, 1961). He also wrote short stories, criticism, children's books, and travel essays, including an account (1941) of life in the United States.

III. The Brazilian Modernists (20^th century)

At the start of the 20th century the Brazilian modernist movement, centered on Sao Paulo, also began to achieve a similar cultural independence through different means. Brazil had gone through the same stages of development as the rest of Latin America, but its political and cultural independence came more gradually. The first emperor of Brazil, Pedro I, was a legitimate member of the royal Portuguese dynasty. Although he declared Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822, the country remained under imperial rule and the dominance of the court in Rio de Janeiro until 1889.

With Brazil thus tied to Portuguese culture, Brazilian writers only little by little assumed responsibility for giving expression to their own landscape and ethnic mix of peoples. The presence of large numbers of former slaves added a distinctive African character to the culture; and subsequent infusions of immigrants of non-Portuguese origin helped the new nation to find its own voice and to use it.

José Pereira da Graça Arnanha

Early in the century the novels of Joaquim Maria MACHADO DE ASSIS (1839-1908), such as Dom Casmurro (1899; Eng. trans., 1953), of José Pereira da Graça ARANHA (1868-1931), and of Euclydes da CUNHA (1866-1909) took stock of both urban and rural Brazilian life. About 1922 the modernist group (unrelated to the Spanish-language modernists of the 1890s) broke totally with this past, declaring themselves representatives of a new vanguard, and in numerous magazines and small publications experimented with verse and prose. A great deal of editorial and dramatic activity spread to areas remote from the coast, thus helping to upgrade the cultural validity of regions other than the largest urban centers. In the past the states of both Bahia and Minas Gerais had fostered active but relatively short-lived literary movements. Mário de Morais ANDRADE (1893-1945) was the foremost exponent of the modernist group.

IV. Recent Latin American Literature

Brazil has given birth to a number of avant-garde schools since modernism, the best known of which is CONCRETE POETRY, and both poetry and prose fiction have continued to develop under local and European influence. Some of the best-known Brazilian authors of recent decades include:

Jorge AMADO (1912-2001),

Érico VERÍSSIMO (1905-75),

Oswald de ANDRADE (1890-1954),

Clarice LISPECTOR (1925-77),

João GUIMARÃES ROSA (1908-67), and




Raquel de QUEIROZ (1910-2003) in prose;

and

Carlos DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE (1902-87),

João Cabral de MELO NETO (1920-99),




Vinícius de MORAES (1913-80), and




Jorge de LIMA (1893-1953) in poetry.

In the rest of Latin America it is safe to say that contemporary prose ranks ahead of poetry in its general quality, particularly in view of the success many authors have had in experimenting with techniques introduced by French novelists and literary critics, such as the "new novel," and with the innovations of such U.S. writers as Faulkner - while retaining a very personal style and a distinctly Latin American voice. Novelists or short-story writers in this vein include:

• Carlos FUENTES and Juan Rulfo of Mexico;
• Alejo CARPENTIER of Cuba;
• Jorge Luis BORGES, Júlio CORTÁZAR, and Manuel PUIG of Argentina;
• Juan Carlos Onetti (b. 1900) of Uruguay;
• Gabriel GARCÍA MARQUEZ of Colombia;
• Mario VARGAS LLOSA (b. 1936) and José Maria ARGUEDAS (1911-69) of Peru; and
• José DONOSO of Chile.

These writers, who are responsible for the boom of the 1960s, have finally managed to fuse the persistent need for self-definition with the need for modernity and universality. Although they have relinquished none of their Latin American specificity, they have expressed themselves in terms that were equally accessible to the much wider audience that is drawn from contemporary Europe and North America.

Many of their novels incorporate painful reassessments of the nation's immediate past as well as suggestions for new courses of action. These range from the creation of a new Latin-American-wide consciousness, which would thus obviate the need for European models, to a return to an almost apocryphal native past. At every turn of history, with every successful choice or error, Latin Americans have evolved their own particular sense of history, and writers have assumed an especially active role in forming this consciousness:

• the famous Canto General (1950) of Pablo NERUDA, for instance, is a summa of all Latin America: its land, its history, and its peoples;
• Cesar VALLEJO in his poetry grieves for all the Christs of the continent;
• Nicanor PARRA (b. 1914) mocks the banality of ordinary experience; and
• Ernesto CARDENAL (b. 1925) exhorts Latin Americans to union and activism in the original Christian sense of setting all people free;
• Nicolas GUILLÉN is the poet who most successfully celebrates the infusion of African blood into the Hispanic cultural mainstream;
• Octavio PAZ remains the best-known exemplar of the cosmopolitan tradition.

V. Persecution and Exile

If Latin American writers have never been far from the historical events that shaped their lives and have borne witness to these in print, they have also had to bear the brunt of political persecution. From colonial times - when many Brazilian poets were banished to Angola - through independence - when many writers had to flee their countries - the price for writing about Latin American reality, as they saw it, has often been exile. Again today many younger Latin American writers are far from the source of their language and of their concerns, yet busily writing about both.

More information at:

http://www.brazilbrazil.com/literary.html

Brazilian Academy of Arts:

http://www.academia.org.br/

Brazilian and Portuguese Writers Gallery:

http://www.culturatura.com.br/autores/

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Escritores_do_Brasil

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literatura_portuguesa

Sites about Brazilian Writers:

http://www.releituras.com/biografias.asp

http://www.klickescritores.com.br/

http://www.biblio.com.br/default.asp

http://www.cce.ufsc.br/~nupill/literatura/obras.html

Some Brazilian writers sites:

http://www.carlosdrummond.com.br/

http://www.machadodeassis.org.br

http://www.fgf.org.br/

http://www.vidaslusofonas.pt/aleijadinho.htm

http://www.vidaslusofonas.pt/villa-lobos.htm

http://www.culturabrasil.pro.br/portinari.htm

http://www.museuvillalobos.org.br/

Sites about Brazilian Literature:

http://www.culturabrasil.pro.br/brasilianliteratura.htm

http://www.nilc.icmc.usp.br/nilc/literatura/modernismo1.htm

http://educaterra.terra.com.br/literatura/index.htm