ABSTRACT
Our concern in this study was to focus on the importance of the process of representing the indigenous in the novel Simá: romance histórico do Alto Amazonas, published in 1857 by Lourenço da Silva Araújo Amazonas (1803-1864). Our main objective was to value the presence of romantic irony in the novel and we thought about the complexity of the construction of national identity through the representation of the indigenous in the novel. We highlight how the aesthetic innovations present in the corpus contributed to the appreciation of the heterogeneity of Brazilian romanticism. We use as main theoretical resource the approach of the concept of romantic irony, according to Kierkegaard (1991), among others and, above all, the idea of literary representation and national identity associated with the figure of the indigenous, according to Schmitt (2010); Reis;Lopes (2000) and Memmi (1976), among others. As the main methodological resource, we adopted the Stricto sensu discussion of our corpus, as well as the valorization of a novel of great aesthetic quality and which awaits greater diffusion in the context of Brazilian literary historiography.
KEYWORDS
Tradition; Romanticism; Brazilian narrative; National identity