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In 1902 Euclides da Cunha wrote his masterly description of an uprising in the Brazilian northeast, Os sertOes (tr. Rebellion in the Backlands, 1944). Canaan (1902), a pessimistic novel of ideas by JosE Pereira da GraCa Aranha, appeared in the same year, and the children's literature of JosE Bento Monteiro Lobato also became popular. The strong nativist and sociological bias of many of these works was even evident in the modernismo movement. It began in Brazil as a poetic movement influenced by French symbolists and led by MArio de Andrade, whose prose work MacunaIma (1928, tr. 1984) made pioneer use of the vernacular; the movement was soon joined by other poets of stature, including Manuel Bandeira.
The social novel came into its own in the 1930s with the works of Graciliano Ramos, JosE Lins do Rego, and Jorge Amado. Their concern with the Brazilian interior has been continued by writers such as JoAo GuimarAes Rosa, whose poetic novel Grande sertAo: veredas appeared in 1956 (tr. 1963). At the same time, the more subjective trend continued with, among others, novelists Rachel de Queiroz, Erico VerIssimo, and Clarice Lispector, poets Jorge de Lima, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, VinIcius de Morais, and CecIlia Meireles, and dramatists Nelson Rodrigues, Ariano Suassuna, and Alfredo Dias Gomes.
Reflecting the rise of military dictatorship, the themes of violence and repression, prominent in Brazilian literature since the late 1960s, run through the novels of IgnAcio de Loyola BrandAo, JoAo Ubaldo Ribeiro, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Rubem Fonseca, and NElida Pinon; through the poetry of Ferreira Gullar and Carlos NEjar; and through the plays of Chico Buarque and Gerald Thomas. The novels of AntOnio Callado and Darcy Ribeiro depict the clash of political and social forces and the collapse of traditional ways of life.
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