Florestas, índios e sabiás: itinerários dos símbolos românticos da nacionalidade na ficção de Antônio Callado

Abstract

Antonio Callado’s novels reveal Brazilian intelectuals’ everlasting desire for national building, since the country’s political independence. Contemporary literature still keeps alive the painful questions about the national being that writers from the past used to ask. During Brazilian Second Empire, José de Alencar’s romanticism translated this collective need, by using a repertoire of edenic and powerful images, which announced a great national future. A century later, facing a political crisis initiated in 1964 by military dictartorship, Antonio Callado’s novels revisit romantic symbols and images, shifting their meaning in order to represent the country’s new political reality. In his writings (in particular, Quarup, esqueleto na lagoa verde, Sempreviva, A expedição Montaigne and Concerto carioca) the romantic national symbols gain degrading meanings and bitter feelings as the author perceives the failure of the desired project of national autonomy and of a just society.