A história editorial do livro Quarto de despejo, de Carolina Maria de Jesus: literatura vista de baixo, consagração cultural e luta de classes (1960-2020)

Abstract

This work is based on two fundamental investigative pillars: the construction of an editorial history for the book Quarto de despejo [Child of the Dark] – covering the period from 1960 to 2022 – and, in parallel, an analysis of the transformations that the image of Carolina Maria de Jesus, the author of the work in question, has undergone over the years, within the framework of the class struggle in Brazilian society. The methodology we will use in our investigation will be the historical-dialectical materialism, as conceived by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology (2002) and described by Engels himself in his booklet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (2010). In line with this methodological vision, this research will focus on the study of the concrete historical and social context from the sixties of the last century to the first years of the 2020s, in an attempt to explain how the public image of Carolina Maria de Jesus and the editions of her most famous work are related to the economic, political and social changes in Brazil within the stipulated time frame. In carrying out this task, we will use the bibliographical and theoretical contributions of different authors, spread across different areas of knowledge: the economic, social and political history of Brazil, the analysis of the Brazilian publishing market, the description and understanding of the meanings of the concept of editorial paratext, literary research and the discussion of the language present in Carolinian texts. We will also use the biographical works on Carolina Maria de Jesus by José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy and Robert Levine (1993), Eliana de Moura Castro and Marília Novais de Mata Machado (2007) and Tom Farias (2017), as well as primary sources such as newspapers and magazines, and audiovisual productions about the writer from Minas Gerais.