‘A National Unity of Interests and Affections’: frameworks of the Union in the Early Brazilian Novel

Abstract

UK novelistic fiction has been consistently acknowledged as a major repository of narrative paradigms for the incipient Brazilian novel. Genres originally offering a narrative solution for tensions embedded throughout the social life of the United Kingdom would cross the Atlantic and, by mid-nineteenth century, be rendered instrumental for structuring local experience. Among these genres, arguably, was the national tale. National tales aimed to bridge the social dilemmas inherent to a multicultural state like the United Kingdom and, more broadly, the British Empire. Works such as The Wild Irish Girl (1806), by Sidney Owenson, Marriage (1818), by Susan Ferrier, and The Absentee (1812), by Maria Edgeworth, engendered sentimental plots of star-crossed lovers who stood for the divergent UK nationalities, allegorically and didactically overcoming the perceived English prejudice against the Irish and the Scots. Circulating in Brazil for at least five decades, national tales purveyed a narrative framework whereby the unsolvable contradiction between colonial heritage and postcolonial nationalism could be fictionally negotiated in an intercultural erotic union. Indianist novels like José de Alencar’s O Guarani (1857) may have re-enacted such framework.