Naturalist literature, morality and nature

Author(s)

Leandro Thomaz de Almeida

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2013-08-26

Examining board members

Márcia Abreu; Pedro Paulo Garcia Ferreira Catharina; Leonardo Pinto Mendes; Lucia Granja; Orna Messer Levin

• Advisor: Márcia Abreu

Abstract

The moral criterion for evaluating the literature, unchallenged while the mid-nineteenth century in Brazil, was also present in the literature naturalist. This finding, nothing obvious if one considers the criticism on naturalism produced throughout the twentieth century, is supported by both the critical reception of contemporary naturalistic novels, as the theoretical elaboration of the writer Émile Zola. By dwelling on the theme of morality as a criterion of evaluation literature from the late nineteenth, this thesis also seeks to explain the relationship that literature and naturalism kept with the idea of nature, very present in discussions involving the task of representing reality that would be proper to naturalism. He also proposes a reading of the novels Bom-Crioulo, A carne e Livro de uma sogra, taking into account the theoretical discussions addressed in the thesis (AU)