A revisão de diferentes posturas críticas no prefácio a’O Conde Lopo, de Álvares de Azevedo

Abstract

We intend to analyze a piece of the critic project of the romantic writer Álvares de Azevedo (1831 – 1852), taken from the preface written to the work O conde Lopo (1848). In this text, specifically in the discussion about the autonomy of the beauty and its relation to the artistic moral purpose, the author keeps an intense dialogue with writers of Western literary tradition, notedly Théophile Gautier and his preface to the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) – as Azevedo looks for legitimation of a critic and aesthetic proposition different from those which can be identified with the preface of Gonçalves de Magalhães for Suspiros poéticos e saudades (1836), whose hegemony was still considerable in the Brazilian literature of that time. Observing such points, we tend to see Azevedo as an author who promotes an amalgam of distinct literary positions, aiming to elaborate a new one, which could work as an option in the Brazilian Romanticism scenary.