Cenários culturais do Baixo Amazonas na obra “O Coronel Sangrado” de Inglez de Souza: uma leitura epistemológica do romance

Abstract

The present dissertation evokes perceptions and conceptual debates of culture within the aspects of the country life and urban civility of the Amazonian people, based on the popular imaginary of Óbidos, a city placed in western of Para State of Brazil, and the literary discourse of Inglez de Souza in the novel "O Coronel Sangrado", written in the nineteenth century. Souza's roman text was analysed in the light of the Epistemology of Romance with its epistemic axis focused on the culture, since the author of this novel uses his personages by means of fictional writing to go in the scope of real life and on the forms of being of Amazonian people; and their relationship so peculiar to the forest, forging a possible Amazonian human condition of being, intertwined with cultures. The theoretical approach through documentary and bibliographical research has led us to present traits, through textual decomposition of the novel – the serio ludere. It allows us the understanding which concepts of culture are used directly or indirectly by Inglez de Souza in ‘O Coronel Sangrado’, as well as Souza's way of evidencing habits of Amazonian culture regarding relations of power in land disputes, between cocoa farmers and the people who lived in the forest during the nineteenth century; conflicting love relations; social factors and other points that without the perception of the concept of culture proposed by Inglez de Souza would be difficult to understand the novel. The deepen research done through the epistemology of romance and the aesthetic reading of the text have presented quite valid results. In this sense, the epistemology and aesthetics used as research tools proved to be effective. Without them, immersion in the cultural settings of the Lower Amazon described in "O Coronel Sangrado" would not achieve the major objective of this study, to present matutice as a social category of culture in and of the Brazilian Amazon region.