Dystopia in 20th-century Brazilian Literature
Dystopia. Brazilian Literature. 20th Century.
Emerging in the 19th century and widely popularized during the 20th century, mainly in literatures in English, the literary dystopia is a genre of writing that speculates about the possibilities of alternative social constructions that imagine plausibly infernal worlds. Due to its great potential for generating narrative conflicts added to the constancy of conflicts and injustices that marked the vast majority of world societies during the 20th century - and that persist during these first two decades of the 21st century -, dystopias, dark sisters of utopia, are a growing number of works and have triggered a body of literary criticism. In Brazilian literature, the first dystopias emerged in the 20th century and have been written and analyzed ever since. Given the relevance and aesthetic and social impact of this literary type, this thesis aims to map the dystopian genre within the corpus of 20th century Brazilian literature, listing as many works as possible that can be understood as dystopias according to certain formal criteria observed and defended by a number of researchers who have been publishing on the topic within the fruitful interdisciplinary field called Utopian Studies. Through this mapping, dystopian narratives are located, selected and analyzed to investigate how these works: 1) fictionally represent, by means of their themes, tropes, images and stylistic devices, diverse negative aspects of Brazilian society; 2) dialogue with each other and also with dystopian works in English in an interdiscursive and intertextual manner; 3) configure the dystopian genre in a particular way, taking into account the social and literary elements unique to Brazilian society, history and culture.