The deformed face of the Belle époque: the monstrous and the cosmovision of Eu, of Augusto dos Anjos, and Urupês, by Monteiro Lobato

Abstract

The aim of these considerations is an investigation on elements of Eu
(1912), of Augusto dos Anjos and Urupês (1918), of Monteiro Lobato, which
attest a common worldview permeable to the monsters and critical to the
aesthetic and ideological models of Brazilian Belle Époque. Published in 1910s,
time of Brazilian modernization under the ideals of progress, eugenics and
bourgeois civility, Eu (book of poetry) and Urupês (selection of short-stories)
explore elements which are avoided by official literature from those times;
elements as the social contradictions of the country, the spots of barbarity
impressed in history and the sordid side of human condition. In Eu and
Urupês, these themes receive literary form under a frank and eventually brutal
language which uses the grotesque and the irony to building a shockingaesthetic
which maximum realization is the motif of monster. In Eu and
Urupês (particularity in the short-story “Bocatorta”), the monster´s body
become a privileged allegory of the History, that express the critic of these
oeuvres to the contradictory process of Brazilian modernization.