A escrita de uma tradição: Macedinho ou Macedo?

Abstract

Still very young, recently graduated from a Medicine College, the Brazilian writer Joaquim Manuel de Macedo became famous for having started the Romantic style in Brazilian novel with its first novel and first national best-seller A Moreninha (1844). The author was then considered a literary promise. Soon, however, he abandoned the playful tone of his first novel. Later, he started writing narratives from a moralizing perspective of his narrator, whose interferences left a limited space for the reader's autonomy. From his second novel onwards O Moço Loiro (1845) , Macedo developed narratives with the same moralizing tone of a narrator, whose metaphorical representation is that of Providence and, consequently, is omniscient. As Macedo wrote several novels similar to O Moço Loiro, literary criticism began to consider him a mediocre author who did not try to add complexity to the form of his novels. This is precisely the point that this Dissertation aims at calling into question. Therefore, we propose that, on the contrary, the Brazilian writer did add complexity to his writings through the development of a first person narrator, who at the same time is the protagonist of the following novels: in A Carteira de Meu Tio (1855), Memórias do Sobrinho de Meu Tio (1868) and A Luneta Mágica (1869), novels which literary criticism has usually overlooked.