The backlands, or the construction of Brazil in Euclides da Cunha´s work

Abstract

This article aims to recover the reading of one of the leading exponents of Brazilian literature (Euclides da
Cunha) from his crucial work (“The backlands”). It also aims to discover the morphology that acquires the
construction of the Brazilian nation in the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century trough the pen of
one of the major writers of the nascent Federal Republic of Brazil.
To this end, the analytical proposal of this paper lies in retracing two dimensions to address the complexity of the proposal of the journalist: first, take into account how da Cunha builds (with political and anthropological density) those place he calls “ the backlands “; and, second, analyze the extensive intertextuality that offers this work by itself, but also how this da Cunha’s work reverberates in other exponents of the literature like D.F. Sarmiento, J. Guimarães Rosa, M. Vargas Llosa or G. Freyre.