The concept of literature of urgency is introduced to define a type of writing produced in some kind of emergency, in situations that are really close to the edge: in Lima Barreto's specific case this is the basis to the analysis of Diário do hospício (Hospice's diary) written by the author in 1919-20, while he was a patient in Hospital Nacional dos Alienados, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It demonstrates how this literature has appeared already contaminated by insanity and by the hospital's routine, constituting simultaneously a self-writing (l'écriture de soi, Foucault's concept) created to defend a trapped ego dealing with the institution and a document of historical value that accuses, from de the patient's point of view, details of the psychiatric routine normally absent from the hospice's official literature.
literature; madness; urgency