A foundling and a militia sergeant: the rise of the individual and the novel

Author(s)

Gabriela Hatsue Yuasa Azeka

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2006-04-03

Examining board members

Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos; Flavio Wolf de Aguiar; Jorge Mattos Brito de Almeida; Marisa Philbert Lajolo; Regina Zilberman

• Advisor: Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos

Abstract

This thesis aims at investigating the formation of the novel as a literary genre in eighteenth-century England, from the perspective of the paradigm established by Henry Fielding (1707-1754) in TOM JONES (1749), as well as its reverberations in the formation of the Brazilian novel in mid-nineteenth century, through the examination of MEMÓRIAS DE UM SARGENTO DE MILÍCIAS (1854), by Manuel Antônio de Almeida (1831-1861). We argue that TOM JONES incorporates in its composition the tension between the so-called spheres of the essence and the appearance, or between the scope of the internal, private and individual as opposed to what is external, public and inherent in the world of social conventions. Such a struggle leads us not only to the moment of genre formation, but also to the historical conditions in which the novel is produced, from the perspective of the rise of the bourgeois individual. Such a tension is not articulated in the MEMÓRIAS with the same level of complexity and effectiveness: once more, that brings us not only to the moment of genre formation on Brazilian soil, but also to the peculiarity of the Brazilian historical conditions, not much favourable to the configuration of the notion of the individual at the time the book was published. (AU)