Amazônia: inferno verde ou paraíso perdido? cenário e território na literatura escrita por Alberto Rangel e Euclides da Cunha

Abstract

The Amazon representation either made by the foreign perspective, or by an autochthonous sight, is manifested wrongly, if not pernicious. An imaginary, sometimes fanciful, sometimes hellish has been established along a historical repetition of (pre) concepts and stereotypes. In many cases, literature has served to this standardization on the attempt to understand and explain the Amazonian region. The first literary texts that put the Amazon in focus in the national Brazilian literary scene are linked to positivism principles in vogue in the nineteenth century and are concomitantly inserted in the realismnaturalism literary tradition. In discussion of the Green Hell (1908) and The Amazon: land without history (1909), respectively written by Alberto Rangel and Euclides da Cunha; we can find these two perspectives: a terrible place or a paradise. In this paper, we will discuss the ideological bases present in the paratextual discourse (GENETTE, 2009) that support the infernal or paradisiacal characterization of the Amazon; questioning at last how the narrative discourse (Fictionality/Factuality) (STIERLE, 2002; SCHMID, 2010) intends to be taken as representative of a space and of societies that dwell there in a certain historical context.