Pardal Mallet, Naturalism and Modernity in 19th century Brazil

Abstract

This paper studies the reception of the naturalistic prose of the Brazilian writer João Carlos Pardal de Medeiros Mallet (1864-1894). Pardal Mallet being forgotten today, in his lifetime, he was considered a celebrity, and one of the promises of the naturalistic novel in Brazil. Naturalism is the art of 19th century industrial civilization, an "aesthetic of experimentation" (BECKER & DUFIEF, 2018), with, modern and bold, new themes and narrative strategies, which became the dominant literature in Brazil and Europe in the 1880s and 1890s (SEREZA, 2022). To understand Pardal Mallet's novel, we rely on the work of Canadian critic David Baguley, Naturalist fiction: the entropic vision (1990), which proposes there were two strands of naturalism in the late 19^th century: the more canonical tragic strand, and a lesser-known strand, named comic or disillusioned, where we propose to position Pardal Mallet's novel. Furthermore, we explore the disillusioned naturalist key in his two novels: Hóspede (1887) and Lar (1888), as well as investigate indications of alternative forms of naturalism understanding in the immediate reception of the works in newspaper reviews. We conclude that Pardal Mallet's work represented an alternative mode of execution of naturalistic methods that has been overlooked by literary historiography.