Fran\u00e7a recounts that he began studying this genre about 15 years ago when he noticed the virtual absence of academic studies on horror literature in Brazil. \u201cThe first question was: did the literature of fear exist in Brazil? And, if it did, why was it ignored?,\u201d recalls the professor, who is coordinating the Gothic Studies research group at UERJ, certified by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). The hundreds of fictional narratives published between the 1830s and 1940s, which Fran\u00e7a and his pupils found in the country’s libraries, were first compiled on the T\u00eanebra<\/em> (Darkness) website, a digital collection created in 2021 that is still being updated by the group’s members.<\/p>\n Some Brazilian horror stories are social critiques and denounce the extreme violence of slavery<\/p><\/blockquote>\n According to the pair of researchers, the short stories and novels that explored fear as an aesthetic effect faced prejudice from nineteenth-century Brazilian literary critics. This was because, at the time, Brazil had recently become independent from Portugal, and critics valued realistic narratives that explored themes linked to national identity. Thus, horror literature suffered from a lack of formal recognition, surviving on the fringes of the literary mainstream. \u201c[Literary critic and USP professor] Antonio Candido [1918\u20132017] highlights that our literature is educational, that it wants to help us understand what Brazil is. The literature of fear, focused on the more macabre and negative aspects of existence, had no place in this literary arena whose mission was to shape a country’s identity,\u201d says Fran\u00e7a.<\/p>\n The response to \u00c1lvares de Azevedo’s (1831\u20131852) work is emblematic in this sense and, according to researchers, reveals the disdain with which literary scholars in Brazil treated scary stories. By exploring elements of Gothic tradition in books such as Noite na taverna<\/em> (Night in the tavern; 1855), a novel with scenes of violence, orgies, incest, and cannibalism, and Macario<\/em> (1852), a story about a student who makes a deal with the devil, Azevedo’s work (see<\/em> Pesquisa FAPESP issue n\u00ba 307<\/em><\/a>) was considered a deviation from the country’s literary tradition. Today, however, we know that the author, who died at the age of 20, was not the only one of his time to deep-dive into horror. In fact, he was not even the first. As early as the 1830s, stories with dark elements circulated in newspapers and magazines, often in pamphlet form, such as the short story \u201cA missa do galo\u201d (Midnight mass), which opens the anthology T\u00eanebra.<\/em> Written by Maciel da Costa, about whom Fran\u00e7a and Nestarez found little information, the story about ghosts and adultery was published in 1839 in Correio das Modas<\/em>, a magazine geared towards women, more than a decade before Azevedo’s literary debut.<\/p>\n In literature, the Gothic style was inaugurated in England in 1764, with the publication of The Castle of Otranto<\/em>, a novel by British author Horace Walpole (1717\u20131797). In the following decades, writers such as Ann Radcliffe (1764\u20131823) began exploring elements that became characteristic of the genre, such as medieval times, haunted castles, stories that go back in time, and supernatural elements, explains Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos, an English and comparative literature professor at FFLCH-USP. Throughout the nineteenth century, the vast number of international publications imported from Europe contributed to the introduction of Gothic elements in novels and stories written in Brazil. \u201cIn nineteenth-century England, literary realism prevailed. Gothic literature was not hegemonic, neither in Brazil nor England. Here, it circulated among our novelists almost like an underground, clandestine current. Machado de Assis himself quotes Ann Radcliffe, for example, in one piece,\u201d she says. Even a prose writer such as Jos\u00e9 de Alencar (1829\u20131877), Vasconcelos continues, who mapped Brazil in \u201cindianista\u201d [Brazilian literary genre of the 19th<\/sup> century that idealizes the simple life of the South American Indian], urban, historical, and regional novels, drew on these resources. \u201cThere are Gothic elements in the novels O tronco do ip\u00ea<\/em> [The trunk of the Ip\u00ea tree; 1871], Til<\/em> [1872], and As minas de prata<\/em> [The silver mines, 1865]. They are not predominant in Alencar’s prose, but they are there,\u201d the scholar points out.<\/p>\n
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