Grotesque, fantastic and Gothic reminiscences in regionalism of Bernardo Guimarães and Monteiro Lobato

• Grant number: 15/09589-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2015
• End date: July 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Brazilian Literature
• Principal Investigator: Fabiano Rodrigo da Silva Santos
• Grantee: Letícia Teixeira Dias
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research is dedicated to the investigation of grotesque manifestations, of fantastic elements, and reminiscences of gothic motifs in two moments of Brazilian literary history: the romanticism, represented here by Bernardo Guimarães´s Lendas e Romances, and the pre-modernism, represented here by Monteiro Lobato´s Urupês. The two writers correspond to poles that evidence the critic evolution of the literary forms of regionalism from romanticism to Brazilian modern fiction and attest the aesthetic elements In common: the utilization of the grotesque, gothic events, fantastic and tragedy, acclimating aspects of the European imaginary fiction, that dialogues to the gothic phenomenon and the fantastic fiction to Brazilian reality. In Bernardo Guimarães e Monteiro Lobato, the dialogue with the European fiction sensible to the supernatural seems adapting to their individual aesthetic projects and to orientations of the periods where they write: Bernardo Guimarães demands in the gothic references sensible to the superstitions that permits configure authentic aspects of our folkloric reality; Monteiro Lobato, In his turn, uses the shocking and grotesque fiction of the neo-gothic tradition of the literatures of English language to, in Urupês, does a critic to the pleasant and bucolic model of the regionalism of his time. Bernardo Guimarães e Monteiro Lobato found in the themes of grotesque, in fantastique, and gothic motifs, mechanisms to compose a regional fiction that search to be authentic and translate cultural aspects of its historic literary moment.