«Pugnas literárias» e políticas acerca do escritor José de Alencar

Abstract

This paper approaches the critique reception to the literary activity of Brazilian novelist Jose de Alencar with a focus on his regionalist work, O gaucho, from 1870. It takes into account a set of letters written by Jose Feliciano de Castilho, alias Cincinato, and published in Rio de Janeiro press in 1871. Common in the press at that time, those letters were printed in the magazine Questoes do Dia: observacoes politicas e literarias escritas por varios e coordenadas por Lucio Quinto Cincinato, and later published in a homonymous book. We focus our attention on those ones that pose some literary features and were used as a political instrument to censor and to de-legitimate Alencar’s literary and political activity as he had strong opinions against the imperial power to which Castilho was allied.