Antônio Sales (1868-1940), naturalismo e O Pão da Padaria Espiritual

Abstract

This master's thesis aims at studying the life and the works of the cearense writer Antônio Sales (1868-1940), collecting, examining and analyzing the presence of naturalism in the short stories produced by him and published in O Pão, the journal from Padaria Espiritual, an artistic association which he created an established. The Padaria Espiritual (Spiritual Bakery), mobilized the literate Ceará youth between 1892 and 1896. In a time when men of letters struggled to bring credibility and rights to the writing profession, a writing style with popular and realistic appeal, such as naturalism, was considered low and uncultured, whose only purposes would be recreation and sales. This negative conception is responsible for the fact that even nowadays the nineteenth-century naturalist aesthetics appears demeaned, placed in a position of inferiority in relation to other more valued literary styles, such as romanticism and modernism. Regarding the Padaria Espiritual and O Pão, we rely on the studies of Wilson Bóia, Gleudson Passos Cardoso, Leonardo Mota, and Sânzio Azevedo. To understand naturalism, we rely on the studies of Afrânio Coutinho, Alfredo Bosi, Lúcia Miguel Pereira, Werneck Sodré e David Baguley.