Politic in literary debates: Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas and revista brasileira

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to study the relations between literature and press in Brazilian XIXth century. This would be done by reading the novel Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, wrote by Machado de Assis, in the Revista Brasileira, the magazine where the novel was published for the first time. The intention of this purpose is to try to understand how this novel is related to the other texts of the magazine, what would allow us to establish the dialogue between a literary work and the context where it was produced. This could lead to an idea of how the first readers of the novel understood it. It is also our intention to investigate historical possibilities that can explain de changes observed in the literary career of Machado de Assis in the moment that Memórias póstumas was written. This concern emerged from an previous work, where we studied the novels Iaiá Garcia and Quincas Borba (MEGID, Daniele. Mulheres de jornal: personagens femininas em romances-folhetins de Machado de Assis. Campinas, SP: [s.n.], 2009), novels that Machado de Assis wrote right before and after Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas. After studying these other two novels, remained the question of how and for which reasons occurred the transition that is known by the critics as first and second literary stage in the career of Machado de Assis. (AU)