Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CULTURE Series Editors TIMOTHY MATHEWS AND FLORIAN MUSSGNUG Comparative Literature and Culture explores new creative and critical perspectives on literature, art and culture. Contributions offer a comparative, cross- cultural and interdisciplinary focus, showcasing exploratory research in literary and cultural theory and history, material and visual cultures, and reception studies. The series is also interested in language-based research, particularly the changing role of national and minority languages and cultures, and includes within its publications the annual proceedings of the ‘Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies’. Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, UCL. Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature, UCL. Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel Edited by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos First published in 2020 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Collection © Editors, 2020 Text © Contributors, 2020 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Silva, A.C.S. and Vasconcelos, S.G. (eds.). 2020. Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787354715 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-473-9 (Hbk) ISBN: 978-1-78735-472-2 (Pbk) ISBN: 978-1-78735-471-5 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-474-6 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-475-3 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787354715 Contents List of Contributors vii Introduction: A Novel Approach to the Rise of the Brazilian Novel 1 Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva 1. Misterios del Plata: (Dis)Figuring History to Forge a Space for a Woman’s Agency 26 Rita Terezinha Schmidt 2. The Historical Significance ofMemórias de um sargento de milícias 45 Edu Teruki Otsuka 3. A providência, recordação dos tempos coloniais and the Novel in Brazil 63 Marcus Vinicius Nogueira Soares 4. Maria Firmina dos Reis and the First Afro-Brazilian Novel 84 Eduardo de Assis Duarte 5. ‘A suspicious sound interrupted the gentle harmony’: Iracema by José de Alencar 107 Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass 6. Displaced Experience and Magic Compromise 127 Jorge de Almeida 7. Brazilian Landscape: A Study of Inocência 141 Eduardo Vieira Martins 8. Silences and Voices of Slavery: A escrava Isaura and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 161 Heloisa Toller Gomes v 9. The Construction of Pseudo-Modern Individuals in Senhora by José de Alencar 180 Maria Eulália Ramicelli 10. Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann’s Lésbia: The Creation of the Woman Writer in Brazil 203 Margaret Anne Clarke 11. O Ateneu: A Singular Masterpiece about the Nineteenth-Century Civilizational Crisis 226 André Luiz Barros da Silva 12. O aborto and the Rise of Erotic Popular Print in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil 239 Leonardo Mendes 13. Machado de Assis and the Novel 257 Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos 14. Capitu against the Elegiac Narrator 277 Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva 15. On Moral and Financial Bankruptcy: Adultery and Financial Speculation in A falência by Júlia Lopes de Almeida 297 Cintia Kozonoi Vezzani Index 317 vi CONTENTS List of Contributors Jorge de Almeida holds a degree (1992) and a PhD (2000) in philoso- phy from the University of São Paulo (USP). He is an associate professor in the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the same institution. He was a visiting professor at Freie Universität Berlin and Université Paris VIII. He has translated Theodor Adorno’s works into Por- tuguese, is one of the editors of the collection Pensamento alemão no século XX (2013) and is the author of Crítica dialética em Theodor Adorno: música e verdade nos anos vinte (2007). At present, he is undertaking the research project ‘Critical Theory and Literature: The Crisis of the Novel in the 1920s’. Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass is an assistant professor of English literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). A member of the Inter- national Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures since 2014, he is the author of two book-length studies on James Macpherson’s Ossian: Sombras no paraíso: dos Poemas de Ossian à prosa indianista de José de Alencar (2013) and Ossian: entre a epopeia e o romance (forthcoming). Margaret Anne Clarke graduated from the University of Liverpool with a PhD in twentieth-century Brazilian literature, which focused on the modernist and Catholic poet Jorge de Lima. Her research interests include comparative studies of lusophone literatures, specializing in two areas: revisionist studies of late nineteenth-century and twentieth- century novelists and poetry, and contemporary Brazilian digital culture and writing. She has published articles and book chapters in all these areas. She has worked at universities in the UK and in Brazil, including as visiting lecturer in comparative literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and most recently as senior lecturer in Portuguese at the University of Portsmouth. Eduardo de Assis Duarte holds a PhD in literary theory and compara- tive literature (USP, 1991) and is a member of the Graduate Program in Literary Studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and vii of the Group of Interdisciplinary Studies of Alterity (Núcleo de Estudos Indisciplinares da Alteridade – NEIA). He is the author of Jorge Amado: romance em tempo de utopia (1996) and Literatura, política, identidades (2005) and editor of Machado de Assis afrodescendente (3rd edn, 2020). As co­­ordinator of the collective research project ‘Afro-descendants: Race/Ethnicity in Brazilian Culture’, he has edited Literatura e afrode- scendência no Brasil: antologia crítica (2nd edn, 2014, 4 volumes), Liter- atura afro-brasileira: 100 autores do século XVIII ao XXI (2nd edn, 2019), Literatura afro-brasileira: abordagens na sala de aula (2nd edn, 2019). He is also responsible for literafro: The Portal for Afro-Brazilian Literature (http://www.letras.ufmg.br/literafro). Heloisa Toller Gomes received her PhD from the Pontifical Catholic Uni- versity of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ) in 1989 and was a Fulbright/LASPAU scholar at Howard University and Yale University. She taught literature at PUC-RJ and Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) and maintains a research affiliation with the Programa Avançado de Cultura Contem- porânea (PACC–UFRJ), where she developed two postdoctoral projects: ‘Postcolonialism, Ethnicity and Cultural Formations’ and ‘A Cartography of Coloniality: The African-Brazilian Case in Perspective’. Her most recent book is As marcas da escravidão (2009, 2nd edn). She has translated into Portuguese W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Her publications include ‘A problemática do arquivo nas Américas: espaços de tensão, pontos de encontro’ (Modos de arquivo, 2018), ‘Brasil e Estados Unidos: considerações sobre o tratamento discursivo da etnicidade, ontem e hoje’ (Literatura e voz subalterna, 2016), ‘Africanidade e território na inscrição (da escrita literária) brasileira’ (Africanidades e brasilidades, 2014) and ‘The Uniqueness of the Brazilian Case: A Challenge for Postcolonial Studies’ (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2011). She is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and participates in the GT/ANPOLL ‘Relações Literárias Interamericanas’. Eduardo Vieira Martins is an associate professor in the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of São Paulo. In his PhD, published later as A fonte subterrânea, he discussed the critical texts of the Brazilian novelist José de Alencar, relating them to the handbooks of rhetoric and poetics that circulated in Brazil in the nineteenth century. His most recent research centres on the construction of the imagery of the sertão in nineteenth-century narratives. He was a visiting professor at Université Paris 8 and is an associate researcher at the Biblioteca Brasiliana Mindlin (BBM-USP). He was a member of the Editorial Board of Literatura e Sociedade (2016–17) and is a referee for several peer-reviewed journals. viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Leonardo Mendes obtained his PhD in literary theory at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an associate professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). He specializes in nineteenth-century Brazilian fic- tion, literary naturalism and pornographic literature. He has published O retrato do imperador: negociação, sexualidade e romance naturalista no Brasil (2000). Edu Teruki Otsuka is an assistant professor in literary theory and com- parative literature at the University of São Paulo. He is the author of Marcas da catástrofe: experiência urbana e indústria cultural em Rubem Fonseca, João Gilberto Noll e Chico Buarque (2001) and Era no tempo do rei: atualidade das Memórias de um sargento de milícias (2016). Maria Eulália Ramicelli teaches British and American literature at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP).