‘A National Unity of Interests and Affections’: frameworks of the Union in the Early Brazilian Novel

UK novelistic fiction has been consistently acknowledged as a major repository of narrative paradigms for the incipient Brazilian novel. Genres originally offering solution tensions embedded throughout social life United Kingdom would cross Atlantic and, by mid-nineteenth century, be rendered instrumental structuring local experience. Among these genres, arguably, was national tale. National tales aimed to bridge dilemmas inherent multicultural state like more broadly, British Empire. Works such The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Sidney Owenson, Marriage (1818), Susan Ferrier, and Absentee (1812), Maria Edgeworth, engendered sentimental plots star-crossed lovers who stood divergent nationalities, allegorically didactically overcoming perceived English prejudice against Scots. Circulating in Brazil at least five decades, purveyed framework whereby unsolvable contradiction between colonial heritage postcolonial nationalism could fictionally negotiated an intercultural erotic union. Indianist novels José de Alencar’s O Guarani (1857) may have re-enacted framework.