Os Manuais de Retórica e Poética: "Lugares de Memória" no Brasil Oitocentista

Abstract

In nineteenth-century Brazil, the publication of poetics and rhetoric handbooks was a relevant practice, being teaching tools which imposed adherence to the European rhetorical culture. The refinement of eloquence, the realm of oratory, prosody, among other themes dealt with in the handbooks, represented knowledge of the past that was recognized in the present as a model and/or rule to be followed, but at another place and at other times. Such handbooks can represent a mnemonic place of intersection between the past and the present in the formation of the Brazilian mentality within the traditional rhetorical and poetical standards. Along this reasoning, this paper aims at analysing some of such nineeenth-century handbooks as vehicles of institutionalized knowledge that, under the school and state aegis, build in their readers’ mind an imagined link between the European classical and learned tradition and the feeling of social representation, of civilization and affirmation of the national identity.