Brazilian literature

Introduction

      the body of written works produced in the Portuguese language in Brazil.

Colonial period

      Brazil was claimed for Portugal in 1500 and was named for the land's first export product, pau-brasil (brazilwood), trade in which was initiated in 1502 by a consortium of “New Christians” (converted Jews) led by Fernão de Noronha. With printing presses scarce during most of the colonial period, manuscripts, when possible, were published primarily in the mother country Portugal—unlike in Spanish America, where printing presses had been established since the early days of colonization. Publications of conquest, travel, and colonization were therefore not encouraged within colonial Brazil. This scenario explains in part why the letter of discovery written to King Manuel I of Portugal by Pero Vaz de Caminha—the scribe to the explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral (Cabral, Pedro Álvares), who is credited with having been the first European to sight Brazil—was not published until 1817, even though its existence had been known since 1773. The letter not only narrates the Portuguese encounter with native tribes and the discovery of natural resources but also reveals the roots of “nativism,” an impressionistic glorification of Brazil's fauna and flora.

      Nativism was also evident in 16th- and 17th-century texts such as Prosopopéia (1601; “Personification”), by Bento Teixeira, and Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil (1618; Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil), by Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, and continuously in texts written throughout the colonial period. Born in Portugal, Teixeira—like all crypto-Jews obliged to practice their Judaism clandestinely—fled to Brazil from the Inquisition, but he eventually fell victim to the Holy Office, dying in an Inquisition jail in Lisbon. Published in Portugal, his Prosopopéia is an epic poem in Classical form that pays homage to a governor in Brazil's Northeast. Despite the Christian spirit at its surface, the poem can be read as crypto-Jewish, hinting at the tribulations of Jews in colonial Brazil. Other cultural and literary activities during early colonization were sparked by the European Baroque via missionary Jesuits. Father José de Anchieta (Anchieta, José de), recognized as the “father of Brazilian literature,” spent most of his life in Brazil catechizing the Indians. Inspired by medieval religious theatre, his dramas represent the best of Brazil's notable Jesuit theatre of the 16th century. Anchieta also wrote the first grammar of the Tupí language (1595).

      Scholars dispute the actual beginning of Brazilian literature. Afrânio Coutinho, for instance, interprets Brazilian literature as the expression of the nativist experiences in the New World. But Coutinho also underscores that Brazilian literature was born under the influence of the Baroque through the writings of Jesuits such as Anchieta. In this same vein, Antônio Cândido, in his Formação da literatura brasileira (1969; “Formation of Brazilian Literature”), emphasizes the European genesis of Brazilian letters and how the civilization was shaped by the colonial experience. Although Brazilian literature is considered to have its “official” origins in the 19th century, during the decade following Brazil's independence (1822), most scholars, like Cândido, recognize local literature as emerging in the 18th century. Within this literature is embedded a distinctly Brazilian cultural context, even though these works make use of European aesthetics and Classical forms. With the Baroque and its variant Rococo in Brazil flourishing up to the mid-18th century, this metaphorical style of rhetoric with its play on words can be found in the satirical poetry of the irreverent 17th-century poet Gregório de Matos Guerra (Matos Guerra, Gregório de). Nicknamed Boca do Inferno (“Hell's Mouth”), owing to his vicious barbs concerning the social injustices in the colony, Matos wrote in a colloquial tone that already betrayed impulses of a Brazilian style. The Baroque can also be found in the prose of Father Antônio Vieira (Vieira, António), a powerful and learned Portuguese Jesuit who spent many years as a missionary among the Indians in the Amazon and the Northeast. Recognized for his 15 volumes of sermons published between 1679 and 1748, Vieira addressed religious and sociopolitical issues in a florid rhetorical style that became well known throughout Latin America.

      In the mid-18th century, literature began to manifest a strong interest in Neoclassical forms of Arcadianism (see arcádia) as practiced by the Minas school of poets, who wrote epic and Neoclassical verse that combined personal lyrics with descriptions of nature and Classical ideals. Greatly influenced by the Enlightenment, these poets formed a “conspiracy” in 1789 with the aim of promoting political independence. The abortive Inconfidência Mineira nevertheless made national heroes of these literary figures, who later were celebrated by several Romantic poets. Two epic poets of the 18th century were Basílio da Gama (Gama, Basílio da) and José de Santa Rita Durão (Durão, José de Santa Rita). As part of the Minas school, they wrote, respectively, O Uraguai (1769; “Uruguay”) and Caramuru: poema épico do descobrimento da Bahia (1781; “Caramuru: Epic Poem of the Discovery of Bahia”). Both epics glorified the indigenous peoples as “noble savages (noble savage)” while praising the natural beauty of the land. Durão's poem, loosely modeled on the form of the Portuguese epic Os Lusíadas (1572; The Lusiads), by Luís de Camões (Camões, Luís de), is, with its detail of native life, an example of exuberant nativism and a precursor to Romantic Indianism. The lyrical poetry of this school, notable for pastoral verses, is to be found in the work of Cláudio Manuel da Costa (Obras poéticas [1768; “Poetic Works”]) and in Tomás Antônio Gonzaga (Gonzaga, Tomás Antônio)'s three-part Marília de Dirceu (1792, 1799, 1812; “Marília of Dirceu”), an amatory tribute to his muse, called Marília. As pre-Romantics, these poets led the way toward a burgeoning national literature.

The 19th century

Independence

 During the tenure of the Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro (1808–22), the colony's ideas of self-governance emerged. When it gained its independence in 1822, the newly declared Brazilian Empire had to forge a national culture, and Romanticism became its vehicle. An important link between the Minas school and the Romantics is the statesman and poet José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva (Andrada e Silva, José Bonifácio de), known as the “patriarch of Brazilian independence,” since it was he who counseled the prince regent Dom Pedro (later Emperor Pedro I) to declare Brazil's autonomy from Portugal. The preface to Andrada's Poesias avulsas (1825; “Sundry Papers”) is a pre-Romantic manifesto condemning Arcadianism's emphasis on reason, order, and formalism and advocating a more original and passionate voice. However, the ideas of science, reason, and progress emanating from the European Enlightenment were still to play a major ideological role in promoting liberalism, a concept incorporated as a foundational ideal for the nation, even though it flourished only for a cultural and intellectual elite. In practice Brazil continued to be a slave-holding society until the 1880s.

nationalism and Romanticism

      Faced with the invention of a past overshadowed by Portuguese control, Brazilians were propelled by the themes of nationalism, primitivism, and Indianism—all inspired by the aesthetics of European Romanticism—to glorify the exuberance of the tropical land and the mythical life of the “noble savage” as images that enhanced nationalist spirit and expression. Therefore, culture (especially literature) and politics converged to formulate the ideology of the Brazilian national state. While Romanticism did produce works of pure subjectivism, the patriotic image of homeland predominated. Brazilian Romanticism (1830–70) began with the publication of Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães's Suspiros poéticos e saudades (1836; “Poetic Sighs and Nostalgias”), a volume of intimate and lyrical poetry. Magalhães, along with other intellectuals and writers, is also credited with having introduced Romanticism to Brazil via the publication in Paris of Niterói: revista brasiliense (1836; “Niterói: Journal Braziliensis”), recognized as Brazil's official Romantic manifesto. Magalhães is also known as one of the initial figures to encourage the theme of Indianism (Indianista novel). The great novelist and statesman José de Alencar (Alencar, José de), considered the Romantic writer par excellence, was also an Indianist, a trait evident in his historical novel O guaraní (1857; “The Guaraní”). A historical work set in Brazil and modeled on the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott, it focuses on the Guaraní as the hero of a mythical "medieval" colonial past. Alencar also wrote numerous regionalist and urban novels, the latter using profiles of bold women to portray 19th-century society in Rio de Janeiro. In these novels Alencar reveals strong powers of observation that are very suggestive of realism; some scholars regard what might be called Alencar's “Romantic realism” as having influenced the greatest of Brazil's 19th-century novelists, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria).

 The most renowned poet of Romantic and Indianist verse is Antonio Gonçalves Dias (Gonçalves Dias, Antônio). His poem Canção de Exílio (1843; “Song of Exile”), which manifests a deep-rooted nostalgia for his homeland, became a national anthem of sorts. The other significant poet of this period is Antônio de Castro Alves (Castro Alves, Antônio de), who wrote antislavery poetry that was later collected in O navio negreiro (1880; “The Slave Ship”) and Os escravos (1883; “The Slaves”), both posthumously published.

      Prior to Machado de Assis, who would become the masterful precursor of the modern Brazilian novel, was another writer, Manuel Antônio de Almeida (Almeida, Manuel Antônio de), significant for his satirical novel of manners, Memórias de um sargento de milícias (1852–53; Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant). Because it conveys a fanciful tone contrary to the reigning Romantic ideology, this novel of popular humour and folkloric realism is not a “true” Romantic or realist novel. With its description of the marginal figure rather than the dominant class of the times, Almeida's novel is credited as the first to introduce Brazil's version of the trickster (trickster tale) (malandro), a figure who operates between order and disorder and who reappears in modern fiction to portray, according to the literary critic Antônio Cândido, a uniquely Brazilian trait of “corrosive tolerance.” (See also trickster tale.)

Emergence of the republic

      Although the schools of Brazilian realism and naturalism manifested themselves almost concurrently, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria) dominated the literary scene by developing a mordant social critique of Rio de Janeiro's bourgeoisie throughout the second half of the 19th century in a prose form close to realism but without its documentary impulse. A lower-class mulato (of mixed African and European ancestry) from Rio, Machado de Assis grew up in a cultured household where his parents were servants, and he eventually ascended the sociocultural ladder. Employing a narrative style considered “modern”—given his deft use of point of view, first-person narration, and subtle irony—Machado de Assis broadened the horizon of the Brazilian novel with Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881; “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”; Eng. trans. Epitaph of a Small Winner), the capricious upper-class cynical and intrusive narrator of which speaks from the grave, and with Dom Casmurro (1899; Eng. trans. Dom Casmurro), a fictional autobiography by a narrator who suspects his wife of adultery, an act never proved to have actually occurred, owing to the novel's first-person narration. While Machado's penultimate novel, Esaú e Jacó (1904; Esau and Jacob), harbours strong allegorical implications regarding the tension between monarchy and republicanism, his last work, Memorial de Ayres (1908; Counselor Ayres' Memorial), a novel in the form of a diary, takes place during the days of the abolition of slavery (1888) and the declaration of the republic (1889). Yet it focuses primarily upon the enduring power of love. Although racism and slavery do not occupy centre stage in his works, these topics do emerge in his novels via secondary characters as well as in his crônicas (literally, “chronicles”; brief prose sketches) and in a few of his more than 200 short stories. These stories portray psychological and philosophical themes ranging from sex and madness to self-delusion, perversion, frustration, social class, injustice, caprice, and other human follies. The Brazilian Academy of Letters was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1896 by Machado de Assis, who also served as its president, and several of his contemporaries.

      Two authors closely identified with the naturalist school who were writing during Machado de Assis's time are Aluízio Azevedo (Azevedo, Aluízio) and Adolfo Caminha. Azevedo's naturalist and somewhat melodramatic novels deal primarily with environmental determinism and denounce social evils. Three novels are representative of Azevedo's contribution to Brazilian literature: O mulato (1881; “The Mulatto”), on racial prejudice, Casa de pensão (1884; “The Boarding House”), on the effects of detrimental social forces upon the individual, and O cortiço (1890; A Brazilian Tenement), influenced by the French novelist Émile Zola, on the outcasts of society, who struggle with money, sex, prejudice, and social position. Caminha's Bom-Crioulo (1895; Eng. trans. Bom-Crioulo: The Black Man and the Cabin Boy) is a landmark naturalist text because of its black protagonist as well as its open treatment of homosexuality. With their portrayals of human passions, Caminha's works often depict the violent and unseemly sides of urban life.

      Many authors, such as Azevedo and the pre-Modernist Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto (Lima Barreto, Afonso Henriques de), incorporated the tenets of the philosophy of Positivism in the dialogues and actions of their characters. Founded by the Frenchman Auguste Comte as a philosophy of the history of the mind via science, positivism appeared in Brazil in the mid-1850s. It was the reigning philosophy there during the abolitionist and republican movements, and the positivist motto “Ordem e progresso” (“Order and progress”) was incorporated into Brazil's national flag. Lima Barreto's work is significant for its documented opposition to Brazil's racial hierarchy as depicted in his novel Vida e morte de M.J. Gonzaga de Sá (1919; The Life and Death of M.J. Gonzaga de Sá). He is also noted for his use of caricature, ridicule, and satire in his masterpiece, Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1915; “The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma”; Eng. trans. The Patriot), a critique of the Brazilian First Republic and a denunciation of the blind patriotism of ufanismo, a modern, hyperbolic version of nativism.

      Beginning in the late 1870s as a response to Romanticism and continuing into the early part of the 20th century, Parnassianism surfaced as a poetry movement advocating “art for art's sake.” Primarily opposed to Romanticism's unbridled sensibility and unrestrained poetic forms, Parnassianism heralded artistic control, polish, elegance, objectivity, and impassiveness. The three outstanding Parnassian poets of Brazil are Raimundo Correia, Alberto de Oliveira, and Olavo Bilac. Symbolism evolved from Romanticism in the late 19th century and employed the imaginative use of extended metaphors suggestive of reveries and mystical states. Influenced by the French poet Charles Baudelaire and his theme of decadence, Symbolists in Brazil also experimented with metrics, repetition, sound effects, and other musical elements. The greatest Brazilian Symbolist poet was João da Cruz e Sousa (Cruz e Sousa, João da), born to freed slaves, who wrote abolitionist verse and was active in the antislavery movement.

The 20th century and beyond

Modernismo and regionalism

      Prior to the vanguard Modernismo movement of the 1920s, several writers emerged with unique and lasting contributions. Euclides da Cunha (Cunha, Euclides da), a journalist, wrote Os sertões (1902; Rebellion in the Backlands), a moving account of a fanatical religious and social uprising in the Northeast. His work called national attention to the “other” Brazil, that of the interior backlands neglected by the government. José Pereira da Graça Aranha (Graça Aranha, José Pereira da) wrote Canaã (1902; Canaan), a novel that examines immigration to Brazil in view of the polemical issues of race and ethnicity as these influence notions of nationalist purity and pride. The novel's narration takes the form of a dialogue between two German immigrants. In it “Aryan purity” is pitted against the potential harmony of Brazil's racial admixture. José Bento Monteiro Lobato (Monteiro Lobato, José Bento) immortalized the backwardness and apathy of the Brazilian caipira/caboclo (backwoodsman/mestizo) in the character of Jeca Tatu. The plight of the neglected, malnourished backwoods populations was described with sarcasm and compassion in Lobato's short stories, collected in Urupês (1918; “Urupês”). Faced with the paucity of Brazilian books for young readers, Lobato also wrote 17 volumes of children's stories and is considered a master of juvenile literature.

      Unlike the Spanish-American Modernismo that emerged in the late 19th century—which paradoxically expressed innovation and tradition, primarily in poetry, in defining a chaotic and exotic present—Brazilian Modernismo, which came later, was a vanguard movement that sparked a veritable rupture with Portuguese academicism and colonial cultural practices. In art, music, literature, architecture, and the plastic arts, Modernismo became a way for artists such as the painter Tarsila do Amaral to modernize national thought. If 1822 represented Brazilian political independence, 1922 symbolized Brazil's cultural independence. Influenced by European vanguardist and futurist movements and led by the cosmopolitan traveler and writer Oswald de Andrade (Andrade, Oswald de), a group of artists and intellectuals from São Paulo officially celebrated Modernismo in February 1922 with the famous Semana de Arte Moderna (“Week of Modern Art”). This cultural event, which consisted of lectures, readings, and exhibitions, pronounced new and disruptive concepts of art to a public not always prepared for their irreverent innovations. As a collective effort, Modernismo involved a renewed study of the past intended to discover what was singular about Brazil, especially its mixed ethnicities and cultures. Of all the manifestos articulating a modern view of civilization, culture, ethnicity, and nation, Andrade's Manifesto antropófago (1928; Cannibal Manifesto) formulated the most lasting original concept to emerge from Brazilian Modernismo. Drawing from the French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne, Andrade metaphorically “digested” the practice of cannibalism and transformed it into a cultural process of the foreign being swallowed for the purpose of inventing, re-creating, and “expelling” something new. In his primitivist Manifesto da poesia pau-brasil (1924; “Manifesto of Brazilwood Poetry”), Andrade inverts the notion of cultural imitation through imports by promoting poetry for “export,” in homage to Brazil's first natural product. He also published a coming-of-age novel, Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar (1924; Sentimental Memoirs of John Seaborne), that attempted to adapt to literature the methods of Cubist (Cubism) visual art.

      As the “pope of Modernismo,” Mário de Andrade (Andrade, Mário de) was the poet, novelist, essayist, folklorist, musicologist, and ethnographer who promoted the idea of an “interested art” that could reach the people. His interest in folklore and in the culture of the past led to his appreciation of Brazil's cultural and racial heterogeneity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his novel Macunaíma (1928; Eng. trans. Macunaíma). The constant metamorphoses that its protagonist undergoes represent not synthesis but the juxtaposition of differences between Brazil's three major ethnic groups and among its various regions. Diminishing the boundary between high art and popular culture, Mário de Andrade studied their interrelationship in order to define an authentic national culture. Modernismo produced other notable poets, including Jorge de Lima (Lima, Jorge de), Cecília Meireles (Meireles, Cecília), and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Andrade, Carlos Drummond de); the last became known as the poet of the people with his satirical views of bourgeois norms, written in a voice employing Brazilian colloquial and syntactical forms. A precursor to Modernismo, Manuel Bandeira (Bandeira, Manuel) is recognized as a lyric poet who introduced colloquial language, “trivial” topics, and popular culture into verses that challenged “correct” and well-behaved lyricism.

      A second phase of Modernismo produced a genre known as the regionalist novel of the Northeast, which emerged during the 1930s when a group of novelists in Brazil's Northeast dramatized that region's decline and underdevelopment after the heyday of sugar production. The sociologist Gilberto de Mello Freyre (Freyre, Gilberto de Mello) spearheaded this regionalist current and immortalized the social structure of the plantation house in Casa grande e senzala (1933; “The Big House and the Slave Quarters”; Eng. trans. The Masters and the Slaves). This sociological study characterized miscegenation and the Portuguese racial practice of commingling with black slaves for the first time in a positive frame; it categorized them luso-tropicalismo, a concept later criticized as contributing to the myth of racial democracy. In a cycle of novels beginning with Menino de engenho (1932; Plantation Boy), José Lins do Rego (Lins do Rego, José) used a neonaturalist style to depict the decadence of the sugarcane culture, as perceived by the impressionistic eyes of a city boy. Rachel de Queiroz (Queiroz, Rachel de), the only female regionalist writer, wrote about the climatic hardships in the state of Ceará in the novel O quinze (1930; “The Year Fifteen”), and in As três Marias (1939; The Three Marias) she evoked the claustrophobic condition of women victimized by a rigid patriarchal system. Jorge Amado (Amado, Jorge), a socialist and a best-selling novelist, focused on the oppressed proletariat and Afro-Brazilian communities in novels such as Cacáu (1933; “Cacao”) and Jubiabá (1935; Eng. trans. Jubiabá). Amado also created strong and dynamic mulatto heroines in Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958; Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon) and Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1966; Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands), the latter a tour de force that has been interpreted as an allegory of Brazil's paradoxically bawdy yet conservative proclivities. The most revered regionalist is Graciliano Ramos (Ramos, Graciliano), whose pungent novels—which include Vidas sêcas (1938; Barren Lives) and Angústia (1936; Anguish)—denounce, in a terse narrative style, the social and economic tragedies of the impoverished Northeast. Memórias do cárcere (1953; “Prison-House Memoirs”) is his autobiographical account of incarceration under the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship of the 1930s and '40s.

Other trends

The short story

      Brazil can claim an enormous body of short-story writers from the 1920s and '30s (e.g., Antônio Alcântara Machado and Rubem Braga) through the upsurge of the short story during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. The short story, which is indebted to Machado de Assis's social and psychological tales, flourished especially during the 20th century in the satires of the pre-Modernist Lima Barreto, in the personalist and innovative stories of Mário de Andrade, in the dreamlike and imaginative narratives of Aníbal Machado, and in the fantastic and allegorical short narratives of Murilo Rubião and José J. Veiga. Beginning in the 1950s, Dalton Trevisan, Brazil's prolific short-story writer par excellence, immortalized lurid scenes of sex and death among the lower middle classes in O vampiro de Curitiba (1965; The Vampire of Curitiba, and Other Stories) and in numerous other collections. He also experimented with the short-story genre by creating ministories and prose haiku. Notable among short-story writers of the second half of the 20th century are Lygia Fagundes Telles, whose tales of women trapped in meaningless relationships sometimes take the form of political allegory, as in the collection Seminário dos ratos (1977; “Seminar of Rats”; Eng. trans. Tigrela and Other Stories); Sérgio Sant'Anna, a novelist whose stories in O concerto de João Gilberto no Rio de Janeiro (1982; “João Gilberto's Concert in Rio de Janeiro”), all executed with sardonic humour, focus upon innovative art, sociopolitical criticism, and marginalized individuals; and Rubem Fonseca, whose incisively graphic crime narratives—from his censored collection Feliz Ano Novo (1975; “Happy New Year”) onward—depict the social inequities in urban Brazil as well as depraved members of the middle class. During the 1990s a new crop of younger writers surfaced under the rubric of the '90s Generation (Geração 90), a term coined by the novelist and short-story writer Nelson de Oliveira, who used it in the title in two anthologies (2001 and 2003) in which he, as editor, collected these writers' works.

The novel

      The two outstanding Brazilian novelists of the 20th century, who are also regarded as master short-story writers, are Clarice Lispector (Lispector, Clarice) and João Guimarães Rosa (Guimarães Rosa, João); both began writing in the 1940s. Beginning with her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (1944; Near to the Wild Heart), Lispector created introspective narratives mostly about women trapped in conventional lifestyles; her narratives explored the multiple and potential meanings behind each word. Her experiments with language, theme, and form produced works of great interest to the feminist and general reader alike, as exemplified in Laços de família (1960; Family Ties), perhaps her most famous collection of stories, and in the novels A paixão segundo GH (1964; The Passion According to GH), Agua viva (1973; The Stream of Life), and A hora da estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star). Guimarães Rosa—a doctor, diplomat, polyglot, and writer—first emerged with Sagarana (1946; Eng. trans. Sagarana), a haunting collection of stories about the people of the sertão (backlands) of Minas Gerais state. An erudite and compassionate artist, Guimarães Rosa used language that incorporated elements of oral tradition and was imbued with neologisms, inverted syntax, and lexical transformations. A “universal regionalist” owing to his empathetic treatment of the theological and metaphysical experiences of his humble and marginal characters, he produced among his crowning achievements the stories in Primeiras estórias (1962; “First Stories”; Eng. trans. The Third Bank of the River, and Other Stories), a collection of hopeful epiphanies, and Grande sertão: veredas (1956; “Great Backlands: Paths”; Eng. trans. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands), his 600-page epic masterpiece on honour, courage, love, and treachery that takes the form of a first-person monologue by a backlands outlaw who makes a pact with the Devil to gain revenge.

      The Brazilian novel continued to thrive with mid-20th-century novelists such as Lúcio Cardoso, whose Crônica da casa assassinada (1959; “Chronicle of the Assassinated House”) offered new introspective and psychological insights into the many dimensions of reality. Osman Lins (Lins, Osman), who began writing in the 1950s, built an oeuvre around the self-conscious process of writing in the context of social injustice. His masterpiece, Avalovara (1973; Eng. trans. Avalovara), is an allegory on the art of the novel in which fiction and life become mutually regenerative experiences. Despite other significant novelists such as Fernando Sabino and Érico Lopes Veríssimo (Veríssimo, Érico Lopes), the second half of the 20th century, especially after 1964, the year of the military coup, was dominated by novelists and short-story writers who were responding to censorship, authoritarianism, and other forms of social repression.

 On the other hand, after military rule ended in 1985, a new crop of younger writers—frequently former or practicing journalists—surfaced with works invoking such themes as multiculturalism, identity, and the insecurities of modern-day life. The most recognized of these novelists at the turn of the 21st century were Bernardo Carvalho, with his Nove noites (2002; Nine Nights)—about Brazil's Amazonia, a place where unstable identities abound—and Nelson de Oliveira, whose Subsolo infinito (2000; “Infinite Underground”) is a narrative of delirium set beneath an urban subway system where everything is mutable.

      The writing of memoirs, fictional and nonfictional, was also a strong current in long prose works throughout the 20th century. Cyro dos Anjos's semiautobiographical novel O amanuense Belmiro (1937; Diary of a Civil Servant) depicts a narrator—a passive bureaucrat—who is overwhelmed by life and society, while Pedro Nava's Baú de ossos (1972; “Trunk of Bones”) is a nonfiction, self-conscious memoir that treats time in a nonlinear fashion. Fictional memorialism reappears continuously in 20th-century narratives and owes much of its forms and perspectives to the autobiographical novels of Machado de Assis.

The theatre

 Brazilian theatre truly hit its stride during the modern period, particularly in the 1940s with the Brazilian Comedy Theatre of São Paulo and with the playwright Nelson Rodrigues of Rio de Janeiro, whose Freudian drama Vestido de noiva (1943; The Wedding Dress), with its revolutionary staging and open treatment of sexuality, became one of Brazil's most important dramas. Concerned with issues of class, machismo, sexual deviancy, incest, violence, and abortion, Rodrigues's audacious plays have been praised for their different narrative levels. Rodrigues was a precursor to later dramatists such as Plínio Marcos and Oduvaldo Vianna Filho (Vianinha). In 1944 Abdias do Nascimento founded the Black Experimental Theatre in Rio to train blacks as actors and to stage dramas based on black history and culture. In the mid-1950s, alternative forms of theatre such as the Arena of São Paulo—with which were associated dramatists such as Vianna Filho, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, and Augusto Boal, all of whom were political activists—used the joker figure to criticize Brazil's social problems and myths. Social theatre from the Northeast received national attention via works by Ariano Suassuna (Suassuna, Ariano) and Alfredo Dias Gomes. Inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959, new theatres emerged from the Popular Culture Centres founded by the National Students Union. These theatres frequently carried to the lower class the educational messages and pedagogical approaches of the educator and author Paulo Freire. Through the end of the 20th century, Brazilian theatre flourished by keeping step with current issues as well as with the latest innovations in staging and performance, such as in the besteirol (“nonsense”) theatre of Miguel Falabella and others.

Poetry

      New poetic voices surfaced under the rubric of the Generation of 1945 and later in the 1950s via the internationally known Concretism movement. The poets of the Generation of 1945 provided a new direction, drawing upon Symbolism, Surrealism, and Hermeticism. From this group João Cabral de Melo Neto (Melo Neto, João Cabral de) and Ledo Ivo distinguished themselves, with Melo Neto regarded as being among Brazil's greatest poets. His Constructivist poetry is characterized by antilyrical language that emphasizes imagism, social facts, and concrete objects from the harsh landscape of the Northeast. The Concretists broke with their generation by emphasizing graphic space as a structural force. Augusto de Campos and Haroldo de Campos (Campos, Haroldo de; and Campos, Augusto de), together with Décio Pignatari, defined concrete poetry in their manifesto of 1958 as something that represents “the critical evolution of forms” through its taking into account “graphic space as a structural agent.” However, in 1959 Ferreira Gullar, who went on to become an influential social poet, established Neoconcretism, which favoured language and subjectivity over graphic space.

      Other experimentalist poetic projects continued through the 1970s and acquired such names as Praxism, Semiotics, and Process-Poem. The popular Violão de Rua (“Street Guitar”) movement was oriented toward mass participation and international social consciousness. The term poesia marginal (“marginal poetry”) embraces noncommercial networks of poetry and represents diverse practices that are marginal in their unconventional production and distribution, in their “uncultured” forms, and in their opposition to the repressive military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. During this period, two acclaimed female poets emerged: Ana Cristina César, with her urban, tormented, feminist voice, and Adélia Prado, who produced earthy yet mystical verses.

Reactions to repression

Resistance literature during military rule, 1964–85

      Political literature in Brazil is not usually treated as a separate category. However, owing to the significant impact that the military regime exerted upon culture and literature between 1964 and 1985, this period can be classified as a notable and separate period of expression in reaction to the authoritarian rule of the time. Literary and cultural expression during Brazil's military rule can be categorized into three major periods. The first, from 1964 to 1968, was characterized by mild repression and overt popular protest. Socially committed Cinema Novo (“New Cinema”) and other forms of cultural protest became representative of leftist mobilization. Examples of resistance literature are Veríssimo's O senhor embaixador (1965; His Excellency, Mr. Ambassador), Antônio Callado's Quarup (1967; Eng. trans. Quarup), Carlos Heitor Cony's Pessach: a travessia (1967; “Pessach: The Crossing”), and José Agrippino de Paula's PanAmérica (1967; “PanAmerica”). With the Fifth Institutional Act (1968), often called the “coup within the coup,” severe censorship (especially of the press) and limitations on all civil rights led to the arrest and imprisonment of artists and intellectuals and to new conditions of life for Brazilians.

      Within the second phase, from 1968 to 1978, the sufoco (“suffocation”) period (1968–73) represented the darkest time and the height of intense censorship and repression. While some works were censored (for example, Rubem Fonseca's collection of short stories about urban violence, Feliz ano novo [1973; “Happy New Year”]), literature—with the exception of theatre—was afforded more autonomy, because a limited reading public represented no threat to the regime. Other resistance works of this five-year period are João Ubaldo Ribeiro's subversive Sargento Getúlio (1971; Sergeant Getúlio), Lygia Fagundes Telles's As meninas (1973; The Girl in the Photograph), about three women from different social classes affected by the dictatorship, Amado's Tenda de milagres (1969; Tent of Miracles), on racial prejudice, and Veiga's A máquina extraviada (1968; The Misplaced Machine, and Other Stories), a collection of magical-realist stories dealing with the effects of totalitarianism.

      In 1975 the government began a dialogue with artists through the establishment of a new policy toward culture. That year also marked the start of a “boom” in the Brazilian novel that had several important currents: testimonial literature, which condemned torture and other forms of violence; autobiographical narratives, which evoked collective memory via individual experience; and journalistic novels, known as romances-reportagens, which spoke for a censored press about real events of violence and abuse. Some of the most significant novels of the period drew upon a combination of these trends, frequently with allegorical statements on power, violence, freedom, and culture. The most acclaimed narratives of political resistance are Ivan Ângelo's A festa (1976; The Celebration), Sérgio Sant'Anna's Confissões de Ralfo (1975; “Confessions of Ralph”), Roberto Drummond's A morte de D.J. em Paris (1975; “D.J.'s Death in Paris”), Moacyr Scliar's Os deuses de Raquel (1975; The Gods of Raquel), Ignácio Loyola Brandão's Zero (1975; Eng. trans. Zero), Autran Dourado's Os sinos da agonia (1974; “The Bells of Agony”), Renato Tapajó's Em câmara lenta (1977; “In Slow Motion”), Renato Pompeu's Quatro olhos (1976; “Four Eyes”), Márcio Souza's Galvez, o imperador do Acre (1976; The Emperor of the Amazon), and Carlos Sussekind's Armadilha para Lamartine (1976; “Booby Trap for Lamartine”).

      The third period of military rule, from 1978 to 1985, celebrated the end of censorship and the declaration of political amnesty for exiled writers, intellectuals, and political prisoners. The first anthology of female writers, O conto da mulher brasileira (1978; “Brazilian Women: Stories”), was published, and it was followed by other writing by women in the 1980s. The career of the feminist writer Nélida Piñon took a new turn with her immigrant saga A república dos sonhos (1984; The Republic of Dreams). Fernando Gabeira's O que é isso, companheiro? (1980; “What's This, Pal?”) and Alfredo Sirkis's Os carbonários (1980; “The Carbonari”), both testimonies by political exiles, also became best sellers. In 1978 a political opening-up (abertura) paved the way for the redemocratization that was established in 1985.

      The musical and dramatic theatre of political resistance exemplified by the Grupo Opinião (“Opinion Group”) combined song and testimony with protest against the censorship of the 1960s and '70s. It was followed by the musical plays of the leftist singer and composer Chico Buarque de Hollanda and his collaborator Ruy Guerra. The anticonventional, vanguardist, postmodern musical movement known as Tropicalismo (Tropicália), which staged rock shows, concerts, and poetry readings accompanied by imported electronic instruments, lasted from 1967 to 1968 and was launched by the songwriters and singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, who “cannibalized” foreign music to produce original musical expression. Many years later, in Verdade tropical (1997; Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil), Veloso recounted the musical spirit and sociopolitical mood of this intense period.

Redemocratization

      After redemocratization and the end of military rule in 1985, literature came to be dominated by established writers who had made their careers during the 1960s and '70s. Fonseca published best-selling detective fiction, including Bufo & Spallanzani (1985; Eng. trans. Bufo & Spallanzani), as well as other novels and short stories. As horas nuas (1989; “The Naked Hours”) expressed Fagundes Telles's female loneliness and isolation, while Sant'Anna's view on the integration of art and life appeared in Um crime delicado (1997; “A Delicate Crime”).

      The novels of resistance had called attention not only to political but also to racial and social repression. Consequently, the myth of racial democracy, first suggested by Freyre and promoted by the military government, was repeatedly challenged, and questions about other Brazilian myths were also raised. While redemocratization restored civil rights, it also witnessed the emergence of muted voices seeking artistic expression. These new voices—immigrant, gay, feminist, and Afro-Brazilian, among others—articulated experiences that had traditionally been marginalized but could only now, after the return of civilian government, be described freely.

      Beside the surge of historical novels and biographies in the last decades of the 20th century, one strong current was immigrant literature. Jewish expression in Brazil first began with Samuel Rawet's Contos do imigrante (1956; “Tales of the Immigrant”; Eng. trans. in part as The Prophet, & Other Stories), a collection of short stories about alienation, cultural clashes, and family feuds. However, only with the prolific novelist and short-story writer Moacyr Scliar, the most renowned contemporary Jewish author in Brazil, did Jewish expression receive more attention. Scliar's work transmits a multicultural perspective on ethnicity and national culture that humorously grapples with difference, identity, and allegiance, as in O centauro no jardim (1980; The Centaur in the Garden) and A estranha nação de Rafael Mendes (1983; The Strange Nation of Raphael Mendes). Younger Jewish writers, such as Bernardo Ajzenberg and Roney Cytrynowicz, frequently dramatize the impact of the Holocaust on Brazilian Jews. While there exist other immigrant literatures (such as Italian and German), a current that emerged in the 1970s is the literature of writers of Arab descent. Brazilian-Arabic prose first found vibrant expression in Raduan Nassar's Lavoura arcaica (1975, revised 1982; “Old-Fashioned Farming”), which is centred on a father-son conflict. Another dynamic Brazilian-Arabic voice is that of Milton Hatoum, who in Relato de um certo oriente (1989; The Tree of the Seventh Heaven) presented a multitextured narrative of a Lebanese family in the Amazon.

 Another form of expression that gained attention at the end of the 20th century was gay literature (homosexuality). Notable writers in this field include Caio Fernando Abreu, Aguinaldo Silva, João Gilberto Noll, Silviano Santiago, and João Silvério Trevisan.

      The post-1985 period also brought a boom in female voices. De Queiroz, Fagundes Telles, and Piñon were among the first women to be admitted to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and Piñon became its first female president. Female writers who blossomed during this period confronted issues of independence, confinement, rage, madness, silence, lesbianism, and sexual freedom. Among the notable female writers of this period are Sônia Coutinho, whose O último verão de Copacabana (1985; “The Last Summer in Copacabana”) is about women in urban settings far away from their regional hometowns, and Lya Luft, whose works evoke the difficulty of communication, especially within families, as in her novel O quarto fechado (1990; “The Closed Door”; Eng. trans. The Island of the Dead). Other important female writers are Marina Colasanti, Márcia Denser, Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares, Tânia Faillace, Ana Maria Machado, Patrícia Bins, and Cíntia Moscovich. Marilene Felinto also became one of the most recognized Afro-Brazilian writers. Marginal literature from the favelas—the slums that surround many of Brazil's cities—is representative of the new current in subaltern expression; Paulo Lins's Cidade de Deus (1997; City of God; film 2002) is an example of such literature. As Brazilian literature reached the 21st century, it was gradually manifesting more diverse and more democratic expression commensurate with the multicultural experiences of the diverse identities in Brazil's variegated society.

Nelson H. Vieira

Additional Reading

General overviews

Isaac Goldberg, Brazilian Literature (1922, reprinted 1978), is a brief, classic history. Érico Veríssimo, Brazilian Literature: An Outline (1945, reissued 1969), originally a series of public lectures, is succinct and readable. Samuel Putnam, Marvelous Journey: A Survey of Four Centuries of Brazilian Writing (1948, reissued 1971), is also a highly readable introduction. Manuel Bandeira, Brief History of Brazilian Literature, trans. from Portuguese (1958), provides acute analysis and authoritative biographical studies of significant authors. Afrânio Coutinho, An Introduction to Literature in Brazil (1969; originally published in Portuguese, 1959), provides a sound critical overview through Modernismo and compares Brazilian literature with other world literatures. Claude L. Hulet (ed.), Brazilian Literature, 3 vol. (1974–75), is a general history prepared under the auspices of the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature; it also contains selections of writings in Portuguese.David William Foster and Roberto Reis (compilers), A Dictionary of Contemporary Brazilian Authors (1981), provides a concise interpretation of each author's major titles. Irwin Stern (ed.), Dictionary of Brazilian Literature (1988), includes essays on authors, literary and cultural movements, and other topics. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker (eds.), The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, vol. 3, Brazilian Literature: Bibliographies (1996), is a comprehensive and scholarly presentation of all periods, movements, and authors. Monica P. Rector, Brazilian Writers (2005), includes authoritative biographies and essays on selected literary movements.

Critical studies

The short story and the novel

Fred P. Ellison, Brazil's New Novel (1954, reprinted 1979), is the first detailed study in English of regionalism and the Northeastern novel of the 1930s. Dorothy S. Loos, The Naturalistic Novel of Brazil (1963), is a useful account and analysis of Brazilian naturalism, its sources, and its primary authors. Daphne Patai, Myth and Ideology in Contemporary Brazilian Fiction (1983), is an original and lucid study of Jorge Amado, Adonias Filho, and Clarice Lispector. Giorgio Marotti, Black Characters in the Brazilian Novel (1987; originally published in Italian, 1982), is a significant study by a leading Italian critic; its focus is Aluízio Azevedo's The Mulatto. Robert E. DiAntonio, Brazilian Fiction: Aspects and Evolution of the Contemporary Narrative (1989), is an insightful study that analyzes 11 Brazilian novels in the context of the country's social and political history. Judith A. Payne and Earl E. Fitz, Ambiguity and Gender in the New Novel of Brazil and Spanish America: A Comparative Assessment (1993), argues that the Brazilian novel is more radical than its Spanish counterpart. Nancy T. Baden, The Muffled Cries: The Writer and Literature in Authoritarian Brazil, 1964–1985 (1999), is a detailed study of the Brazilian postmodernist novel, covering issues of authoritarianism, exile, censorship, dissent, and resistance. Candace Slater, Stories on a String: The Brazilian Literatura de Cordel (1982), is one of the first studies in English of stories-in-verse known as folhetos, a genre unique to Brazil.

Theatre

Fred M. Clark and Ana Lúcia Gazolla de Garcia, Twentieth-Century Brazilian Theatre (1978), is a collection of essays on Oswald de Andrade, Nelson Rodrigues, Dias Gomes, and Plínio Marcos. David George, The Modern Brazilian Stage (1992), is the most thorough book in English on 20th-century Brazilian theatre.

Poetry

John Nist, The Modernist Movement in Brazil (1967), is a critical study of Modernismo poetry that focuses on Mário de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Jorge de Lima, Cecília Meireles, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and others. Charles A. Perrone, Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry Since Modernism (1996), is the best and most comprehensive study covering Brazilian poetry from 1950 to 1990.

Movements and other topics

Merlin H. Forster and K. David Jackson (compilers), Vanguardism in Latin American Literature: An Annotated Bibliographical Guide (1990), is a comprehensive reference source that lists all the vanguard movements in Brazil and Spanish America. Wilson Martins, The Modernist Idea: A Critical Survey of Brazilian Writing in the Twentieth Century (1971; originally published in Portuguese, 3rd ed., updated, 1969), presents comprehensive essays on the representative works and authors of Modernismo, with a special focus on writers of fiction. Earl E. Fitz, Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context (1991), argues for a comparative assessment of the literatures of the Americas as a cohesive project outside the traditional frame of constant reference to the European literary tradition. David Miller Driver, The Indian in Brazilian Literature (1942), is a pioneering study in English, although dated. John King (ed.), Modern Latin American Fiction (1987), includes a superb essay on nationalism in 20th-century Brazilian culture. Renata R. Mautner Wasserman, Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830–1930 (1994), is a beautifully written and sophisticated analysis of Brazil and the United States in the context of the formation of national identity. Susan Canty Quinlan, The Female Voice in Contemporary Brazilian Narrative (1991), gives special attention to Lya Luft, Márcia Denser, and Sônia Coutinho. Susan Canty Quinlan and Fernando Arenas (eds.), Lusosex (2002), is a collection of essays that discusses the links between gender, sexuality, and nationhood in the Portuguese-speaking world. Nelson H. Vieira, Jewish Voices in Brazilian Literature: A Prophetic Discourse of Alterity (1995), provides a brief history of Jews in Brazil and an analysis of 20th-century Jewish expression. Raymond S. Sayers, The Negro in Brazilian Literature (1956), is the best comprehensive study of the subject through the first half of the 20th century.Nelson H. Vieira

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