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Martin Paul Eve

Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London

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This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subject. They implicitly or explicitly describe a canon not of my own making or choosing and replicate this from various sources. The original encyclopaedia articles are far more comprehensive, nuanced and worth consulting. I am especially conscious in articles such as this, which work with complex and detailed racial histories, that the summary here is reductive and incomplete; but nonetheless a starting point. I am also cognizant that some of the living writers here may not even wish to be categorized under this racial rubric. However, as I am summarizing various facts from encyclopaedic sources, I present this as-is, nonetheless.

THe Brazilian novel is conventionally understood as coming into being as a category following the country’s 1822 political independence from Portugal with Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s A moreninha (1844, The Little Brunette) often considered the first. There was then a phase of Braziliam romanticism from approximately 1846-80, with standout texts including José de Alencar’s O Guarani (1857, The Guarany). In the next stage, works of Brazilian realism and naturalism handled the subject of slavery, such as Aluísio Azevedo’s O Cortiço (1890, The Slum). These debates about race, but also the status of immigration in Brazil, were explored at the beginning of the twentieth century in novels asuch as José Pereira da Graça Aranha’s Canaã (1902, Canaan) and Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto’s O Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1915, The Sad End of Polycarp Lent).

These texts fed into the development of Brazilian modernism from around 1922-30, exemplified in works such as Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928). After a revolution in 1930 came a period of so-called ‘social novels’ such as Jorge Amado’s Terras do sem fim (1942, The Violent Land). After this phase, there was a turn to lifewriting and experimental self-portraits, known as The New Narrative according to Passos (p. 99). A good example here is Clarice Lispector’s A paixão segundo G.H. (1964, The Passion According to G.H.). Following a military coup in 1964, an emergent strain of political novel emerged, such as Antônio Callado’s Quarup (1967).

Since 1985, the Brazilian novel has continued to proliferate across a range of forms with “new social movements gradually [making] their way into the national literary market” (Passos, p. 99). This includes feminist texts, LGBT authors and issues, and eco-fiction, which although featuring throughout the history of the Brazilian novel were rarely seen as independent thematic strands. Some contemporary works within this culture include Marilene Felinto’s As mulheres de Tijucopapo (1981, The Women of Tijucopapo), Rubem Fonseca’s Bufo & Spallanzani (1985), Joao Almino’s Samba-Enredo (1994, The Samba), and Ana Maria Gonçalves’s Um defeito de cor (2006, A Color Blemish)

Further reading:

  • Armstrong, Piers, ‘The Brazilian Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, ed. by Efraín Kristal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 105–24
  • Passos, José Luiz, ‘Brazil’, in The Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. by Peter Melville Logan, Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 97–105