Marcas e metáforas do Rio de Janeiro escrito e vivido por Lima Barreto

Abstract

The writer, journalist and intellectual, Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, has recorded in almost all of his writings his impression on social political and urban changes suffered by Rio city in the first Republic. By using part of his work and biography, these changes will be analyzed based on the own author's thoughts. There will be addressed the impression left by urban and topography modifications that occurred in the capital of Rio de Janeiro city and overlapped the old scenery of the city, hiding it in order of deleting it from the memory of the inhabitants at the same time that they appeared as metaphors of supposed progress and modernity. Metaphors create in us engrams, that is, impressions that can be retained in our mind by the action of literariness. Literariness has always some acceptance in the most diverse types and genres of narrative. These impressions of urban changes reached somehow the daily routine of a considerable part of authors that lived in that period, among them Lima Barreto himself. This work is based on the tripod biography- literature-metaphor, built by the impression of the Rio city re-shaping, conveyed by Lima Barreto during the First Republic in a narrative that flirt with ethnography.