O gótico-naturalismo na literatura brasileira oitocentista

Abstract

The present study aims to identify and describe the presence of typical elements of the literary Gothic tradition in the Naturalist poetics specifically in Brazilian Naturalism in the period between 1880 and 1899. It is assumed that the disillusionment with the directions of the modern world manifested by naturalist writers such as Aluísio Azevedo, Rodolfo Teófilo and Adolfo Caminha can be described as a gothic world view , which, together with the aesthetic and supposedly scientific discourse used by these authors, gave way to a new poetics that emerged at the fin-de-siècle, the Gothic Naturalism. To understand how Gothic Naturalism was understood by Brazilian criticism and historiography, the critical fortune of the three writers mentioned is analyzed in order to demonstrate how the deviation from Naturalism towards Gothic was often identified as romantic literature or simply an evasion, and, consequently, of an inferior aesthetic value. Finally, we identify the main topoi of this hybrid poetics, using as examples Brazilian narratives. In these terms, the research, therefore, seeks to demonstrate that Naturalism did not distance itself from its own poetics by absorbing elements of the Gothic tradition, but only incorporated narrative techniques and resources that were appropriate to the expression of the authors of its school and that were consistent with the spirit of the times brought about by the fin-de-siècle changes