Martins Pena, a theater man in Brazilian literary criticism

Abstract

Martins Pena had a wide theatrical production in the first half of the nineteenth century as a comedy author, which has been seen as a minor genre since Aristotle's Poetics, characterized as "an imitation of men worse than the average". In such context, we propose that his work’s importance may have suffered some losses – caused by interpretations made by critics like Sílvio Romero and José Veríssimo. Thus, we present our discussion of the absence, during a certain period, of a theatrical historiography that would allow us to separate Literature from Performing Arts, since Martins Pena, a "theatre man" who had salient features regarding the construction of dramaturgical action, had his work put on a different perspective in relation to other authors focused on scene’s textual construction.