CULTURE AND POPULAR LITERATURE IN VERSE IN THE DIGITAL CORDEL COLLECTION OF FUNDAÇÃO CASA DE RUI BARBOSA

Abstract

The portal “Cordel: popular literature in verse” brings together, in a digital environment, a sample of what is considered the largest collection of cordel in Latin America, which is under the custody of the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa (FCRB). The rare collection began to be formed from the 1960s onwards and through it several studies were elaborated in an attempt to understand the genesis and demarcate a historiography of cordel in the Brazilian context. However, the legitimized canon in Brazil has been contested by researchers who defend the uniqueness of the national production, disconnecting the phenomenon from the scriptocentric perspective presented in the first studies that attribute the origin of the cordel to the Iberian novelist and that ignore the oralized character of Brazilian poetics. This article aims to highlight, through a bibliographical research, the importance of the digital collection of twine made available by Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, highlighting the processes of constitution, organization and access to the collection, articulating different notions such as culture and identity, intangible heritage, cultural policies, cultural diversity, oral traditions and digital cultures. It also presents a survey of ten authors and their most representative works available in the digital collection.