Novas engrenagens do colonialismo em “A Selva”, de Ferreira de Castro

Abstract

This work aims to analyse the novel The Jungle, written by Ferreira de Castro (1898 – 1974), published in 1930, in dialog with author’s life experiences, who lived and worked in a rubber plantation in the Amazon forest for four years, between 1911 and 1914. Our purpose shows Ferreira de Castro’s perspective of denoucing the perpetuation of an old colonial system of slavery and exploration of the man by the man in the rubber plantations. We started this work with a short presentation about the historical context so that we can understand what was the place that Ferreira de Castro lived during his childhood and teenage years in Portugal and Brazil. Next, we present an overview of the critical fortune about Ferreira de Castro, and we enter into a more detailed reading of A Selva, showing the reader how the work denounces the validity of the colonial system within the Amazon. To do this, we used excerpts from the novel in dialogue with authors who wrote about the Amazon and also with novel theorists