Brazilian literature

A few more explicitly literary examples survive from this period, such as

Neoclassicism lasted for an unnaturally long time, stifling innovation and restricting literary creation. It was only in 1836 that Romanticism began influencing Brazilian poetry on a large scale, principally through the efforts of the expatriate poet Gonçalves de Magalhães. A number of young poets, such as Casimiro de Abreu, began experimenting with the new style soon afterward. This period produced some of the first standard works of Brazilian literature.

The key features of the literature of the newborn country are exaggerated affect, nationalism, celebration of nature and the initial introduction of colloquial language. Romantic literature soon became very popular. Novelists like Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, Manuel Antônio de Almeida and José de Alencar published their works in serial form in the newspapers and became national celebrities.

Around 1850, a transition began, centered on Álvares de Azevedo. Azevedo's short story collection Noite na Taverna (English: A Night at the Tavern) and his poetry, collected posthumously in Lira dos Vinte Anos (English: Twenty-year-old Lyre), became influential. Azevedo was largely influenced by the poetry of Lord Byron and Alfred de Musset. This second Romantic generation was obsessed with morbidity and death.

At the same time, poets such as

• 
  Luís Gama
• 
  José de Alencar
• 
  Gonçalves de Magalhães, Viscount of Araguaia

Realism

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. Brazilian Realism was not very original at first, but it took on extraordinary importance because of Machado de Assis and Euclides da Cunha.

Machado de Assis

Usually appointed as the greatest Brazilian writer of all times, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is also the most important writer of Brazilian Realism. 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.

Working as typesetter at a publishing house, he was soon acquainted with most of the world's literature and became fluent in English and French. 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.

After being introduced to Realism, Machado de Assis changed his style and his themes, producing some of the most remarkable prose ever written in Portuguese. The style served as the medium for his corrosive humour and his intense pessimism, which was very far from the plain conceptions of his contemporaries.

Machado's most crucial works include:

• Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), the fictional autobiography of a recently deceased man, written by himself "from beyond". It is entirely anti-Romantic and ridicules the society of Rio de Janeiro of the time. This book contains one of the most pitiless sentences about love ever written: "Marcela amou-me durante quinze meses e onze contos de réis; nada menos". (Marcela loved me for fifteen months and eleven thousand réis
  ; nothing less.)
• Dom Casmurro purports to be the autobiography of a lonely man who has left his wife and his only son after enjoying years of happy conjugal life. The novel is famous in the Portuguese-speaking world for its analysis of a (possible, but never proven or admitted) case of adultery.
• Quincas Borba
• O Alienista, the short story about a psychiatrist
  who founds a hospital for the mentally ill in a small town and later engages in profound investigations on the nature and the cure of mental illness, greatly upsetting the town's lifestyle.

• 
  Machado de Assis
• 
  Aluísio Azevedo
• 
  Raul Pompeia
• 
  Olavo Bilac
• 
  Raimundo Correia

Pre-Modernism

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The period between 1895 and 1922 is called Pre-Modernism by Brazilian scholars because, though there is no clear predominance of any style, there are some early manifestations of Modernism. The Pre-Modern era is curious, as the French school of

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. He discovered, for instance, that Sebastianism was then present in the Brazilian North-East and that many medieval Portuguese rhymes, folk-tales and traditions were still kept by the coarse people of the "sertões". This population did not accept secularism, the Republican government and, especially, justice or peace.

His trilogy Os Sertões is composed of three parts titled "The Land", "The Man" and "The fight". Such organization of the book reinforces the idea that the environment where a man was born, the social aspects of his residence and the man's culture may define what he will become. This principle is known as determinism, a way of thought that deeply influenced Brazilian literature during the mid- and late 19th century and the early 20th century.

• 
  Euclides da Cunha
• 
  Lima Barreto
• 
  Augusto dos Anjos

Modernism