Brazilian literature

Journals of voyagers and descriptive treatises on "Portuguese America" dominated the literary production for the next two centuries, including well-known accounts by Jean de Léry and Hans Staden, whose story of his encounter with the Tupi Indians on the coast of São Paulo was extraordinarily influential for European conceptions of the New World.

[5][6] A few more explicitly literary examples survive from this period, such as Basílio da Gama's epic poem celebrating the conquest of the Guarany Missions by the Portuguese, and the work of Gregório de Matos, a 17th-century lawyer from Salvador who produced a sizable amount of satirical, religious, and secular poetry.

At the same time, poets such as Castro Alves, who wrote of the horrors of slavery (Navio Negreiro), began writing works with a specific progressive social agenda.

The two trends coincided in one of the most important accomplishments of the Romantic era: the establishment of a Brazilian national identity based on Indian ancestry and the rich nature of the country.

Iracema is especially lyrical, opening with five paragraphs of pure free-style prose poetry describing the title character.The decline of Romanticism, along with a series of social transformations, occurred in the middle of the 19th century.

A new form of prose writing emerged, including analysis of the indigenous people and description of the environment, in the regionalist authors (such as Franklin Távora and João Simões Lopes Neto).

Under the influence of Naturalism and of writers like Émile Zola, Aluísio Azevedo wrote O Cortiço, with characters that represent all social classes and categories of the time.

Born in Rio de Janeiro City (by the time, imperial capital of Brazil), he was the natural son of a half-black wallpainter and a Portuguese woman, whose only education, besides literacy classes, was the extensive reading of borrowed books.

In his early career he wrote several best-selling novels (including A Mão e a Luva and Ressurreição) which, despite their overzealous Romanticism, already show his vivacious humour and some of his pessimism towards the conventions of society.

The Pre-Modern era is curious, as the French school of Symbolism did not catch on and most authors of Realism still maintained their earlier styles and their reputations (including Machado de Assis and poet Olavo Bilac).

His stories, together with some essays he wrote about the people and the geography of the Brazilian Northeast, were published in a thick volume called Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands).

In his work, Cunha put forward the revolutionary thesis that the Brazilian state was a violent and foreign entity, rejected (but often tolerated) by the vast majority of the illiterate and dispossessed population, some of whom preserved beliefs and behaviours that had not changed in a thousand years or more.

Jorge Amado, one of best-known of modern Brazilian writers, tried with his novels to approximate his works to a proletarian literature, he himself was a member of the communist party which defended Socialist realism at the time.

What defined Brazilian modernism were two main traits: experiments in language and an enhanced social consciousness, or a mix between the two - as was the case with Oswald de Andrade, who was briefly attracted towards the communist movement.

Following the wake of conservative subjectivism inaugurated by the militantly Catholic novelists-cum-polemicists Octavio de Faria, Lúcio Cardoso, Cornélio Penna and Gustavo Corção, Nelson Rodrigues made his career as a playwright and sports journalist.

His plays and short stories - the latter mostly originally published as newspaper feuilletons - chronicled the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s; adultery and sexual pathologies in general being a major fixation of his.

For a time heavily pro-dictatorship, he had to suffer the tragic fate of having one of his sons being tortured and incarcerated for belonging to an underground guerrilla organization.Contemporary Brazilian literature is, on the whole, very much focused on city life and all its aspects: loneliness, violence, political issues and media control.

Writers like Rubem Fonseca, Sérgio Sant'Anna have written important books with these themes in the 1970s, breaking new ground in Brazilian literature, up until then mostly having dealt with rural life.