14 - Brazilian popular literature (the literatura de cordel)

Summary

Side by side, and often intertwined, with the work of Brazil’s best-known novelists, playwrights, and poets, popular literature has played a primary role in the nation’s cultural life over many centuries. “Popular” is used here to mean of and by the people. It refers to prose, poetry, and theatre produced and consumed primarily by persons of limited means and education, operating on a local and, sometimes, regional basis, as opposed to that created by educated individuals writing for themselves and for a literate national and international audience.

A good deal of Brazilian popular literature is primarily or exclusively oral. It includes a wealth of Medieval Portuguese and often pan-European dramatic forms, such as puppet theatre and Christmas pageants, as well as a variety of proverbs, folktales, and legends, a number of which have all but disappeared in Spain and Portugal. Not infrequently, these Iberian transplants have fused with other, equally varied, and deeply-rooted African and indigenous traditions. From time to time, one can also detect further borrowings from the various immigrant groups (German, Japanese, Syrian and Lebanese, Italian, and Jewish, among others) which have found a home over the centuries in Brazil.

In addition to this myriad of oral traditions, many of which have yet to be systematically collected and studied, there is also a large and vibrant printed literature known as the literatura de cordel. Significant both in its own right and as an ongoing source of inspiration for a variety of educated authors, the cordel has become of increasing interest over the last few decades not only to scholars but also to a more general public.