“Autora de Seus Dias”: the critical mobilization of Maria Firmina dos Reis in Brazilian Romanticism

Abstract

This article analytical focus is to analyze how the Maranhão writer and teacher Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825 - 1917) raised her authorial ethos and inserted herself into Brazilian romanticism. Through the inquiry of her historicity and by the account of her texts, we can affirm that the auteure lived up to the aesthetics and the romantic discourse, however, due to the racist and sexist mechanisms of election of historiographic and literary canons, figured limitedly in the histories of Brazilian historiography and literature. Which steadily prevented us from accessing her important perspective on the history of Brazil conveyed by the literary text. Herewith, our aim is to expose that through the political mobilization of Maria Firmina dos Reis within Brazilian romantic literature, giving lights to the novel Úrsula (1859) and the short story A escrava (1887), how literary creation encompasses the writer's critical bias, therefore being an epistemic contribution to literary studies and the history of Brazilian historiography.