Literature and bourgeois ideology in Brazil (1856-1880)

Abstract

This project aims to study the representation of the Brazilian novel's protagonist between the years 1856 and 1880. This approach has two main axes: the first, a literary one, assumes that the form of the modern novel is based on the individuality of the protagonist as opposed to the traditional forms of life; the second, a sociological one, which acknowledges that our process of political emancipation was not able to overcome the colonial sociability and its mode of production. That is why the protagonist is the best place to study the tension between an abstract form - the liberal emphasis of the genre - and the raw material of Brazilian social experience, based on a paternalistic ideology. This tension also allows a literary criticism, which, according to Franco Moretti, tries to give social explanation to formal chances throughout literary history.