Duas Narrativas Para O Lugar Dos Indígenas Nas Origens Da Nação: A História Ficcional De Magalhães E Alencar

Abstract

History and literature express senses to the social world via narratives that subsidize historical investigation, with fragments of its networks of social and intertextual dialogue. In accordance with those theoretical and methodological assumptions, this article aims to analyze the Indianism promoted by Brazilian Romanticism, through the study of the controversy between Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães and José de Alencar. A Confederação dos Tamoios (1856), epic poem written by Magalhães and narrated in the form of verses, depicted the 1554-1567 conflict undertaken by indigenous Tamoio people against the Portuguese and their practice of indigenous slavery. The poem did not have a totally positive reception, with emphasis on José de Alencar's criticism who, under the pseudonymous Ig, claimed that the epic format did not capture the idealized heroism of indigenous characters and the specificities of Brazil, due to lack of emphasis attributed to characteristics of nature. A mutual point of convergence in the approach was the emphasis on the indigenous character, born out of an approximation with accounts from chroniclers, though via different approaches: Magalhães adopted the fidelity to "testimony" sans idealization; while Alencar followed the opposite way and poetized natives. These literary clashes confirmed the formulation of a Romantic literature, based on the study of chroniclers for composition of fictional texts, evidencing the fluidity between History and Literature in the nineteenth-century literary universe. KeywordsConfederação dos Tamoios -Gonçalves de Magalhães -José de Alencar -nature -indigenous. http://dx.