Terror e crime na literatura brasileira finissecular

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the rise of a branch to the Brazilian crime literature ranging from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. This study is also part of the project which aims at establishing, in the traditional Brazilian literature field, a corpus of fear literature , that is, a group of fictional narratives which is capable of fictionally expressing real fears and/or producing the art-fear as a reading affect. We hypothesize that there was, in Brazil, a tradition of fictional works focused on criminal characters. Our theoretical approach counts on the art-horror model by art philosopher Noël Carroll as well as on studies on fear by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. This dissertation also delivers a historical path of traditional crime fiction in order to bring out elements which may link it to art-fear. For this reason, we have traced back to the roots of this genre in Brazilian literature, scanning works which could dialogue with our theme, both in popular fiction and canonical pieces from that aforementioned period. For the sake of applying the results we have found, we lastly offer a reading analysis of the chronicles and fictional works by Carioca journalist and writer João do Rio, highlighting elements which may contribute to frame this author as a quintessential of Brazilian fear literature