Imitation and Emulation in Luso-Brazilian Literature: Francisco Rodrigues LObo, Gregório de Matos e Guerra and Tomás Pinto Brandão

Abstract

The objective of this study was to analyze the relationships between two principles (imitation and emulation) that were the basis of creating poetry during the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries.  Concerning the former, we undertake a new reading of Aristotle’s Poetics with the intention of demonstrating that mimesis, when it is the imitation of action, is above all the imitation of affect and/or pathos. In poetic genres, the declarative voice is not that of an individual poet but that of a persona feigning pathos. Today’s readers of poems believe there is “expressiveness” or “sincerity” in what they read, without perceiving that all of it is affected by the application of discursive, grammatical, poetic, and rhetorical techniques. Emulation, as recognition of a need and the desire to overcome it, is the emulation principally of that which is most excellent, or rather, of the characters and their deeds; in poetry, it is an attempt to imitate and supersede model discourses; appropriation, thus, of states of pathos that already figure in their agreement with the conventions of the genre. We attempt to make evident in the present study that emulation is the imitation of imitation and is the productive character of Aristotelian mimesis of the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries.