Between History and Literature: The national identity in Lima Barreto

Abstract

This article intends to reflect about the crossing between literature and history to build historic knowledge, searching in the first one a new look about the national identity immediately after the beginning of the republican regime in Brazil. For our analyses we privileged the literary production of Lima Barreto, which gave us the possibility of thinking about the formation of national identity from several situations lived by marginal people, in other words, the black, the half-breed, poor people. This identity was made under the feeling of belonging to a country and not by the homogenized speech made by the elite and authorities, but its search for social affirmation.