the effects of remoteness. the figure of the indian and the gaucho in two novels of alencar

Under the Brazilian romanticism project to build a national culture and literature, José de Alencar published in 1870 O Gaúcho and, four years later, Ubirajara. In both novels, he experimented with two typical inhabitants of his country: the gaúcho and the indian. The hypothesis developed in the paper is that they took such an extreme idealization of these “original” Brazilian human types that Alencar's prose was confronted with certain narrative crossroads. These could only be resolved by appealing to resources that streamline the course of the incidents but that work to the detriment of the artistic unity of the novels.