Cruz e Sousa: Modernidade e mobilidade social nas duas últimas décadas do século XIX

Abstract

This History Master s Dissertation tried to make a re-reading of Cruz e Souza s life experience. The current paper has as its main purpose to understand his way of life, his limits and his attempts of social mobility. Cruz e Souza lived in a period of time were there were deep changes both in the political and social contexts. His disappointment with the society of that period has become into poetry. His poetry has earned important space in the research field and a decadentist symbolist aesthetic was the way he founded to better express this disappointment. The letters he wrote to his friends and relatives were also used in the research, since they enabled us to perceive his dreams, desires, expectations and frustrations. The course of his life worked as a guide that led us to understand the contradictions, the ambiguities, the possibilities and the limitations concerning to the attempts of social mobility of a free black man living in a period of time marked by discussions about the end of the slavery and the establishment of the Republic . In the first chapter, we tried to make a brief introduction about Cruz e Souza and his family, his first years as a poet in Desterro / Florianopolis, his relationship with the city as well as its organization and urban modernization process. In the second chapter, we emphasize the poet s networking in the society during his youth, where theater and sessions with readings and discussions of philosophy and literary news as well as the literary soirees were responsible for gathering this little group of young people. In the third and last chapter, we analyze Cruz e Souza in Rio de Janeiro, his new social circle, the publication of his main works, his search for a room in the world of poetry and the beginning of a group of symbolist poets identified by their decadentist aesthetic