O belo horrível na literatura indianista de José de Alencar

Abstract

Throughtout the letters about A confederação dos tamoios (1856), José de Alencar analyses the epic poem A confederação dos tamoios, written by Gonçalves de Magalhães, identifying “failures” about the way that the poet developed the crucial subjects of our Romantism, such as the indigenous peoples and nature. Through his writings, the cearense writer gets along relevant subjects of the romantic aesthetics, claiming that many of them weren’t quite developed among the poem. One of the verified rules by Alencar is the one called hideous beatiful, which is made of the construction of images that bring up terror and fascination for the reader. The sensation of hideous beaity is brought up by the making of scenes that quickly develop and on which, beautiful and terrifying images may be seen and identified. Such images, thanks to the quickness they come up and fade away during the novel, end up causing a deep impression on the reader/observer’s soul. Certainly, such a concept may not be considered an “innovation” from the cearense writer, once that we can acknowledge his proximity to Edmund Burke’s Sublime, for whom beauty and fear, once that they’re related, may bring up the feeling of grandiosity and magnificence. Going from the observations as well as the concept of hideous beautiful, showing up from the aesthetic alencarinas letters, we intend to make an investigative study about the indianist romances from the alencarinos, such as O guarani (1857) and Iracema (1865), so we can observe how José de Alencar developed, from these works, the concept from his critical studies about Magalhães’ poem.