On prologues and epilogues: splits and national formation in writing and reading fictions of Brazilian 19th and 20th centuries

Abstract

This essay seeks to analyze the process of representation of Brazil in prologues and epilogues of fundamental texts of Brazilian literature, showing how attempts to transform the country’s constitutive divisions into fiction are created in this set of texts, as well as implicit solutions that reveal horizons of expectations and class positions of the authors. We will analyze texts from the romantic period (by Alencar and Gonçalves Dias), as well as from the late 19th century (Machado de Assis and Euclides da Cunha), reaching texts from the 20th century (Mário de Andrade) and we will find representations that construct scenes of reading and confrontation dramatizing divisions within the dominant classes and between such classes and other segments of society. The final object of the analysis is to understand how the problem of the nation is transformed into eminently literary questions in these texts, which, in turn, can help understand what the idea of a national formation project meant among us.