Iracema: a new route to Ipu?

Abstract

This paper aims at suggesting and proposing a new analytical and critical approach to the novel Iracema, by José de Alencar, in the light of an aesthetic perspective involving the myth-history diad and culminating in an integrative or pantheist philosophical view of existence. In order to associate Alencar’s legend to the possible emergence – not of the first Ceará state or Brazilian person, but of mankind as a whole, in the figure of an American (Moacir), we use the notion of “the end of the world”, as suggested in the Antiguidade da América manuscript, and thus as something eschatological to be symbolized in the Indianist’s work.