History and Literature: Literary sources in the recent historiographical production in Brazil

Abstract

The use of literature as research material, which was consideredillegitimate or disqualified by historians for most of the 20th century,has been a widespread practice since the 1970s, when approximationmovements took place, pointing, in our point of view, to differentways of working with the literary text. In turn, these ways originatefrom distinct forms of understanding and dealing with the conceptsof authorship, discourse, (con)text, and, above all, literature andpolitics. In an attempt to understand divergences and convergences,and consulting part of the research in Brazil which have literature assource, in this essay, we consider the possibility of exploring at leasttwo counterpoised perspectives: one, in which the literary is taken as asubstratum of inquiry by the historian, considering the reconstitution ofwhat is identified as History as something that antecedes in existence; theother, in which it is taken as a substratum for the scrutiny of perceptions,representations, figurations, by means of which we investigate howthe imaginary and the temporal are instituted as such. In this approachto the theme, we attempted to detect some elements that composethese different perspectives with no intention of establishing labels or