Magalhães, Domingos José Gonçalves de (1811–1882)

Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães (b. 1811; d. 1882), considered the "father" of Brazilian romanticism. Magalhães was a doctor, a poet, and an influential diplomat of the empire who enjoyed the favor of Emperor Dom Pedro II. While living in Paris he fell under the influence of the European romantics. In 1836, along with the romantic painter and poet Manuel de Araújo Porto Alegre (1806–1879) and Alberto Torres Homem, he cofounded a literary review, Niterói: Revista Brasiliense. While his early poetical works reflected the conservatism of the neoclassical literary canon, they also contained slight echoes of nascent liberalism.

His first collection of poems, Suspiros poéticos e saudades (1836), offered a pantheistic view of life: Nature is omnipresent in, and consequently the major influence on, the poetic art. That same year, influenced by the romantic concept of nationalism, he published the first "history" of Brazilian literature, "Discurso sobre a história da literatura do Brasil." Romantic nationalism is also evident in his most notable drama, António José; ou, O poeta e a inquisição (1839), about the eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian writer condemned by the Inquisition. Although he continued to write throughout his lifetime, his last major work (and the one for which he remains best known today) is the epic poem A confederação dos Tamojos (1856), in which he legitimizes the total destruction of an Indian tribe in the pursuit of independence and the establishment of the empire.

See alsoLiterature: Brazilxml .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

David Miller Driver, The Indian in Brazilian Literature (1942).

Raymond Sayers, The Negro in Brazilian Literature (1956).

Additional Bibliography

Campato Júnior, João Alberto. Retórica e literatura: O Alencar polemista nas Cartas sobre a Confederaçao dos Tamoios. São Paulo, Brasil: Scortecci Editora, 2003.

Huppes, Ivete. Gonçalves de Magalhães e o teatro do primiero romantismo. Lajeado, Brasil: Fundaçao Alto Taquari de Ensino Superior, 1993.

Teixeira, António Braz. O pensamento filosófico de Gonçalves de Magalhães. Lisboa, Portugal: Instituto de Filosofia Luso-Brasileira, 1994.

                                                       Irwin Stern