Decadentismo e desilusão: o desencanto pela modernidade na Literatura do Rio de Janeiro da Belle Époque

Abstract

The topic of this dissertation is to analyze the literary production that has as its central idea the sense of decadence, disenchantment and hopelessness of a group of Brazilian men of Letters during the Belle Époque in Rio de Janeiro. This decadence sense is displayed as a gap through which it is possible to point the contradictions, limitations and possibilities of modernization of the federal capital and, as an extension, the whole Brazil in late XIX and early XX centuries. In the first chapter, the objective is to analyze how Rio de Janeiro was about to enter on its most intense phases of material and cultural changes as part of a even more ample process of insertion of Brazil in the international scenario and how the literature followed this moment, proposing new ways of interpreting the country. In the next chapter, an archeology of the thematic of decadence, in Europe and in Brazil, indicates the aesthetic and intellectual bases that animates the sensitivity of decadent writers, examining the reading of Poe, Baudelaire and the literary mysticism made by the Brazilian men of Letters and les poetes maudits in late XIX century. In the following chapter, it is proposed an investigation about the literary criticism of the period about the movement and the possibilities of reading and interpretation that this time had over those writers' literary production. In the last chapter, an examination on the interna) and external sociability of the group, their contradiction and divisions that culminated in its dissolution