Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
The twentieth century opened in Brazil with an atmosphere of intense political and economic interest but without a corresponding intensity in a literary manifestation. In the Amazonian area, Brazil’s “last frontier,” the rubber boom which had begun around 1860 was nearing its peak, focusing both public interest and international speculation upon the “exotic rainforest.” The abolition of slavery in 1888 had resulted in large-scale appeals by the Brazilian government to certain foreign nations for the immigration of families with agricultural experience, bringing to Brazil thousands of Italian, German, and (after 1908) Japanese families. On the political scene, the advent of the Republic in 1889 had brought a decade of opportunism, austerity, factional unrest, and general disappointment to the country and, as the century turned, Brazilian intellectuals were in the throes of intense national self-examination in an attempt to discover whether Brazil was indeed in a period of progress or of decadence and whether the nation merited any kind of confidence at home or abroad. Reactions ranged from euphoric admiration (Afonso Celso, For que me ufano do meu pais, 1900) to pessimistic condemnation (Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões, 1902 [Rebellion in the Backlands]). Essayists throughout Brazil found their most fertile field of endeavor in the analysis of national strengths and weaknesses and the attempt to identify solutions to the latter. The perennial presence of national self-consciousness in Brazilian thought as the twentieth century began to run its course may be verified in the writings of essayists such as Alberto Torres (O problema nacional brasileiro [1914]), Monteiro Lobato (Idéias de Jeca Tatu [1919]), and Paulo Prado (Retrato do Brasil [1928]). Its pervasiveness in the genre of prose fiction will be observed throughout the present chapter.
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