A Testament Immortalized in Scarlet Letters: Literariness, Materiality, and Illustration in A verdadeira história de Chapeuzinho Vermelho [The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood] (2020)

Abstract

Literature, as the art of words, presents its text in different forms and languages. Whether through its humanizing potential or, still, through its narrative quality, it reaches readers and offers them a plurality of tools to create texts, using established works as arguments. After all, literature holds within its scope narratives that are true treasures arranged as a testament for all of humanity. Thus, in this article, our goal is to analyze the literary work A verdadeira história de Chapeuzinho Vermelho [The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood] (2020)[1] by Agnese Baruzzi and Sandro Natalini, presented as a book-object with a keen materiality. We will seek to understand the characteristics of the work that promote literary aesthetic enjoyment, moving the work away from a didactic and moralizing perspective. To do so, we will comprehend the specificities of the verbal text, the imagery, and the materiality characteristics that pervade the work, understand the techniques, tools, and proposed interactions, as well as recognize the book’s multimodal capacity.

[1] The English edition of the book is: BARUZZI, Agnese; NATALINI, Sandro. The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood. London: Templar, 2009. As the analysis is not a linguistic one, but mainly an imagetic one, the author opted for translating from Portuguese to English some passages in the book for the sake of illustration of the discussion. For this reason, whenever “see footnote 1” appears, it will, in fact, refer to Brazilian edition BARUZZI, Agnese; NATALINI, Sandro. A verdadeira história de Chapeuzinho Vermelho. Tradução de Índigo. São Paulo: Brinque-book, 2020.