Honoré de Balzac and Camilo Castelo Branco: nineteenth-century social criticism in comparative perspective

• Grant number: 09/01777-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: July 01, 2010
• End date: February 28, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Other Vernacular Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Paulo Fernando da Motta de Oliveira
• Grantee: Ana Luísa Patrício Campos de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

From a comparative study between novels written by Honoré de Balzac and Camilo Castelo Branco, fundamental authors to the comprehension of the nineteenth century literature in France and Portugal, it was raised the hypothesis that the comparison between these writers is not only made of remarkable similarities. Thus, taking into consideration the absence of critical studies about this aspect, our intent is to analyze a unprecedented question concerning the comparison between the Balzaquian and Camilian fiction: the different conception that their narrators show about the social effects in man - the human benevolence that, sometimes, overcomes the evil influence of the French nineteenth century materialistic society versus the inevitable influence of the adverse effects of the Portuguese nineteenth century money-oriented society on man.Consequently, it is intended to examine, in some Balzaquian and Camilian novels, Eugénie Grandet and Onde está a Felicidade?, and others to be selected, how these worldviews dialogue with Rousseaunian theory, according to which man is good and it is the society that degenerates him, expressed in the "Discourse upon the origin and the foundation of the inequality among mankind" (1999).