Articles and letters as a multidisciplinary laboratory: the childhood as a tópos and the outline of an éthos of the province in Brazilian Modernism

Abstract

The objective of this essay is to discuss how the childhood becomes a literary tópos that relates to the provincial and the Brazilian perspectives taking as a basis of analysis the personal correspondence and the published work of some modernist-regionalist North-eastern writers,such as Gilberto Freyre, Jorge de Lima, José Lins do Rego, and Manuel Bandeira. Private archives can include diverse and plural documents, among which the letters of writers, intellectuals and artists occupy privileged space as radiating centre of broad intertextual relations. We will see, therefore, affective and intellectual devices in the construction of contradictory images of the childhood, the family and the province, regimented by a tense dialogue, for example, between rural and urban, public and private, province and metropolis, tradition and avant-garde.