THE BRAZILIAN GOTHIC IN THRESHOLD (1935) BY CORNÉLIO PENNA

Abstract

In the last two decades, numerous researchers have reinterpreted Brazilian literature in the light of negative poetics – a set of works in which the use of literary strategies and devices are employed to represent the darkest aspects of the human experience and produce negative aesthetic effects. As the Gothic is the most important of these poetics, there appeared studies proposing the existence of a Brazilian strand. This article aims to contribute to the conception of the Brazilian Gothic, by developing the ideas of scholars Fernando Monteiro de Barros (2014; 2020) and João Pedro Bellas (2021). To this end, we divided our text into three sections: in the first one, we review the main trends in Brazilian literary historiography and criticism, which have always stifled representations and expressions differing from the implemented realist-naturalist perspective; in the next section, we indicate the canon placed Cornélio Penna Brazilian literature; finally, in the last section, we elaborate on the question of the Brazilian Gothic and its formal and thematic elements in Penna’s Threshold (1935).