Search

Romantic and modernist Brazilian literature tried to tackle the issue of our nationality as a means of self-recognition, a search for national identity. With the rise of post-modernism and especially of cultural studies, the question of national identity and of the representation of the nation is back again; historians, social scientists and literary and visual arts critics have been discussing the theme and we, therefore, see analysis of novels, short stories, poems, paintings, installations, movies and TV series, among others, which deal with how these media try to represent the nation - or if it is still possible to speak in a totalizing way about narratives of the nation and of national identity. Nonetheless, this matter does not seem so compelling in theatre studies. Although there are plays which attempt to narrate a space and its society, whether it be the nation or the city - the latter sometimes representative of an idea of nation -, the debate on what this idea of nation and national identity are is, in theatre studies, limited. Thus, this article aims at analyzing how the nation was imagined and the understanding of national identity in the play BR3, signed by Bernardo Carvalho and staged by the company Teatro da Vertigem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze how the writer José Pereira da Graça Aranha represented the Brazilian national identity in the set of essays The aesthetics of life, published in 1921. José Pereira da Graça Aranha (1868-1931), born in São Luís do Maranhão, Brazilian writer and diplomat, graduated in Law from the Recife Law School. Graça Aranha was concerned with defining what it meant to be Brazilian. In an attempt to address this issue, he elaborated to explain what constituted the Brazilian being and the reasons for having such characteristics. He publicized his projects through publications, which included texts such as essays, novels, among others. The Aesthetic work of life is formed by a set of essays, among which Aranha exposes her philosophical conceptions of the world, presenting the view that each people has its own characteristic that would form the soul of the race. For Aranha, each nation would integrate the universal whole through its uniqueness. In this work the author explains how this whole would be formed and how Brazil could find its characteristic to integrate it, defending the conservation of Portuguese characteristics and the political union of Brazil and Portugal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lucía Miranda is a character identified with the formation of the region of Rio de la Plata, which will star, in the 19th, two of historical content written by Rosa Guerra and Eduarda Mansilla. The stories presented by the two authors differ in the treatment of the theme and seem to propose different ways of seeing the history and the possibilities of constructing signs of national identity. In this work, I analyze comparatively the two works and the ways in which they turn into fiction an event considered historical. At first, the paper presents some considerations about historical novel and its uses in the nineteenth century. In a second moment, I present a brief review about the myth/history of Lucía Miranda and about the life of the authors Rosa Guerra and Eduarda Mansilla. Then, a comparative analysis of the two novels is presented to establish the points of convergence and divergence between the two works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]