Canaan flagellated: the reception of ‘paulistas’ working class on João de Minas’ novels

Abstract

João de Minas was a writer with a literary work with twelve books
published from 1929 to 1936. Some of his books are set in great towns
like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Our main goal in this article is to
broach how the writer treats the question of work and proletarian in
his detective and sexual novels. In this works we note that writer, in
a proper humored ironical style, contradict the hegemonic “paulistas”
fictions that exalt the progress as he stresses the exploitation suffered
by workers. However, João de Minas doesn’t engage himself in their defense, but represent them having bourgeois values of that time, and
whose social ascension occurred by unlawful business for men or by
prostitution for women.