Lendo o Rio de Janeiro: literatura e sociedade no século XIX

"Reading Rio de Janeiro" charts a new path for understanding the cultural history of Imperial Brazil. To bring the Rio social mesh to life, Zephyr Frank reverses the historian's habitual interest in literature as a source of evidence and instead uses history to understand literature.

Focusing on the theme of social integration through the novels of José de Alencar, Machado de Assis and Aluísio Azevedo, the author draws the reader’s attention to the moral conflicts of the characters when they are faced with the new mobility, capitalist, urban, so different from the slave plantations of the past.

Some characters grow and triumph in this scenario, while others find defeat. Although literature permeates this 19th-century Rio social history, it is full of maps, charts, non-fictional sources and statistical analyses that are the historian's resource.

By connecting a literary understanding of social problems with the quantitative data provided by traditional historical methods, Frank unravels a richer and deeper understanding of society in 19th-century Rio.