Novels adrift: British contributions to the making of the Brazilian novel (original) (raw)

In an interview given in 1977 to a Brazilian periodical, one of Brazil's leading literary critics, resuming a debate brought about by his 1973 essay "Misplaced Ideas", argued that not only do ideas travel but, in the case of Brazilian nineteenth-century literature, they travelled by boat, "coming from Europe every fortnight, on board steamships, in the shape of books, magazines and newspapers". 2 Books, magazines and newspapers which, with the suspension of censorship in 1821, started circulating more freely and constantly in the bookshops, libraries and circulating libraries established in Rio de Janeiro, mainly from the 1820s and 1830s onwards. Among these books -available for purchase or rental -, there were novels and romances. They came mostly from Lisbon and Paris and were in their majority Portuguese or French. Until recently, there was not much evidence as to the existence of English novels among the books sent to Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian literary historians and critics tended to consider this presence and their impact on Brazilian novel writing and novelists small and irrelevant. What a more thorough investigation about those books reveals, however, is that Britain and British novelists were much more prominent and played a much more important role in the making of the Brazilian novel than previously thought. As a matter of fact, a considerable amount of the novels that had Rio de Janeiro as their destination did actually hide their true origin, challenging the claim that French novels and novelists were foremost as models in the making and consolidation of the Brazilian novel.