History of Brazilian Literature: from dawn to down

Abstract

Since grammar, rhetoric and poetics were the first disciplines designed to study certain aspects of linguistic practices, a new field of knowledge emerged in this area in the 19th century, called history of literature. In Brazil, from the middle of that century onwards, the discipline of Brazilian literature, conceived in a historiographical key, began to appear in school curricula, and books were successively published to support its teaching. From Le Brésil littéraire: histoire de la littérature brésilienne (1863), by Ferdinand Wolf, to História concisa da literatura brasileira (1970), by Alfredo Bosi, these works had their importance acknowleged in academic circles. At the turn from the 20 to the 21th century, however, literary history began to face literary theory and shortly after cultural studies, which is correlated with the decline in interest in the great treatises on the history of Brazilian literature.