Vida Urbana, Marginália, Feiras e Mafuás: a modernidade urbana nas crônicas de Lima Barreto

Abstract

The objective of this work is to analyze the chronicles written by Lima Barreto, from the perspective of the insertion of Brazil in the first decades of the 20th century modernity, considering the issues that impacted the country during the First Republic, such as the technological and scientific development, the cosmopolitism, the urbanization of Rio de Janeiro and other matters that overloaded mainly the daily routine of the urban society at that point. The corpus of this research is extracted from the Lima Barreto s books Feiras e Mafuás, Marginália and Vida Urbana. The criteria for the selection of the chronicles was based upon the higher possibility of displaying a better representation of cultural movements if compared to the compulsory modernity of Rio de Janeiro; the chronicle as the interface of the press with literature; the consideration of the cultural aspects of Lima Barreto s chronicles and the chronicle in a dialog with daily images. Thus the theoretical approach attempts to define modernity and its results in Brazil from the point of view of thinkers and critics who study chronicles and the press of the onset of the 20th century. Based upon Lima Barreto s work, the role of the intellectual as a mediator and an interpreter of modernity and its tensions is also reflected