The article focuses on the intellectual formation of Alceu Amoroso Lima, during a period in which he emerged as one of the foremost critics of the 1920s. It highlights the combative role that made him an advocate of tradition and an adversary of the São Paulo modernists - Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda - who, though lambasted by him, recognized his critical potential. The text also examines two shifts that led him first to become a champion of Ultramontane Catholicism, and later to endorse the aggiornamento, the Catholic Church's change in direction following the collapse of fascism, which made him a key figure in containing modernism's radical tendencies and also in the advent of the 1945 generation. Documenting the critic's trajectory allows us to examine the relations between the political, religious and literary fields in the first half of the 20th century
Alceu Amoroso Lima; Literary criticism; Brazilian thought; Modernism; 1945 generation