Modernism and regionalism in Brazil: between innovation and tradition

Abstract

The interpretations of modernism in Brazil have tended to concentrate on the avant-gardes that emerged in the first two decades of the 20th century in Brazil's two most important cities: Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. This article examines the spread of literary modernism from the 1930s onwards into three regions on the periphery of the country's innovative impulse, but which nonetheless possessed well-established cultures - the Northeast, Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul - and which produced over the following years Brazil's most flourishing literature. From a literary viewpoint, therefore, the new ideas became radicalized precisely in the contexts most resistant to modern lifestyles. As well as investigating this movement towards states on the side-lines of modern culture, the text proposes to analyze the diversity of this literature vis-à-vis the impasses faced by these regions during the modernization process. Setting out from this underlying problem, it explores the connections between the Northeastern social novels, the Minas Gerais subjectivist literature and the gaúcho (southern Brazilian) historical novel with the particularity and diversity of the social and political tensions experienced by these regional elites in clear decline. A special focus on the literature of mineiro author Lúcio Cardoso helps shed light on the conflicts that permeated the field as a whole, since, though always particular, in Cardoso's work these tensions attain their most virulent expression