North and south: the experience of disillusion

• Grant number: 19/19958-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2020
• End date: January 31, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos
• Grantee: Rafaella Gobbo Reis da Silva
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The following research project intends to investigate Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, North and South, and its formal literary shapes constructed by the narrator's 'voice' concerning class relations between characters as expressions of 'experiences of disillusion'. In this sense, this research project aims to analyse the formal mechanisms in which the narrator constructs the loss of an immanent meaning through the novel's social relations. This study starts from George Lukács' concept of "romance da desilusão" accepted as "a desintegração, a ausência de forma, devido à incapacidade de dominar o tempo existente dotado de força e peso excessivos", and intends to expose the reverberations and burden, inside the novel, of a historical condition, such as the Industrial Era, permeated by the impossibility of symbolical meanings and values towards the world, as well as this condition reflected upon the formal structures created by the third person narrator.