Notes on Antonio Candido and the Brazilian Novel of the 1930s

Abstract

From the beginning of his career as a literary critic, in the early 1940s, Antonio Candido gave centrality to modernist production, a field in which he developed fundamental elements of his intellectual thinking. In this article, we will reconstitute the main lines of Antonio Candido’s criticism of the so-called romance of the 1930s [Brazilian novels of the 1930]. As this is a favorite subject of the author’s, disseminated in numerous texts covering at least forty years of intellectual activity we will analyze three concepts formulated at different times: the pre-consciousness of underdevelopment, localist de-repression, and the routinization of modernist aesthetics. By approximating these concepts, without necessarily subjecting them to chronological rigidity, in order to avoid evolutionist schematism, we intend to highlight the points of convergence and interest that remained throughout his work. With this, we will argue that the critic seeks to highlight a new stage in Brazilian life inaugurated by the Revolution of the 1930s and characterized, among other things, by the feeling of displacement of the intellectual class in the face of the modernization that was being announced at the time and by the conception of an aesthetic radicalism present above all in the form of the novel.