ENLIGHTENMENT LITERARY CULTURE IN CASTRO ALVES’ OS ESCRAVOS: THE HUMANITARIAN NARRATIVE AS A COMBAT STRATEGY

The humanitarian narrative, generated during the Enlightenment, is a literary technique characterized by the description, in dramatic form, of human suffering in order to arouse compassion in readers and encourage them to sympathize with people who suffer from it. By using it, writers identified with Enlightenment ideals sought to gain the support of their audiences to combat the evils that degraded the human condition. Based on this premise, the objective of this article is to show: 1) that this literary technique is one of the constitutive elements of Castro Alves’ work Os escravos (1883); 2) that because of this the referred work can also be interpreted as an intellectual production tributary of the sentimental discourse of the enlightenment moral philosophy, especially its philanthropic values expressed in the concept of humanity; 3) In expressing them, this author addresses the history of slavery in a scattered manner in the aforementioned work, so that when the poems are regrouped they compose a versified historical “narrative”.

Keywords:
Enlightenment; humanitarian narrative; Castro Alves; slavery