Abstract:
In the 19th century, Brazil and the River Plate countries take a leading position regarding the epic genre: the controversy over The Confederação dos Tamoios (1856) was accompanied by the publication of an enormous number of epic poems, exceeded only by the amount of texts of the same genre published in the River Plate region. The cultural intersections between the two cultural spaces has been explored only in recent years. The Brazilian and River Plate epics inspired each other. There are, for example, theoretical contributions by Argentine or Uruguay authors - exiled in Brazil - that focus on the country of exile. The most important example is the epic poem Cantos del peregrino (1846-57) by José Mármol, who uses the ‘tropical’ motif to put Brazil in scene as a space of inspiration that favours, above all, heroic poetry. This article explores the contact between the epics of the three countries (Juan María Gutiérrez, Joaquim Norberto de Souza Silva, José Mármol), focusing on the theoretical discourse about epic poetry in the paratexts (prologues, footnotes, glossaries) and in autoreflexive passages in epic poems.
Keywords:
Magalhães; A Confederação dos Tamoios; Gutiérrez; Mármol; Souza Silva; Cantos del Peregrino; Epic Poetry