Library Collections of the late nineteenth century: contributions of Brazilian Literature

Abstract

There are few studies on the formation of the Brazilian readers in order to use the collections available in the country in the late nineteenth century. One of the apparent reasons is the difficulty of scholars track which works were present in Brazilian libraries of the time. This study aims to demonstrate that it is possible to fill this gap by reading and tracking of the works mentioned in the novels and other texts of the main authors of Brazilian literature of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The study presented here provides a survey of the texts cited by the character/ narrator Sergio, the novel The Athenaeum, Raul Pompéia. The reading of the work was performed, collected all literary references, as well as authors and texts and then was made a list of the works and the quotation procedure of the narrator/author demonstrating that works and authors cited were read by him in Brazil the end of the nineteenth century. It is the beginning of a large tracking aimed at composing by reading the Raul Pompéia books, Machado de Assis, Aluísio Azevedo, Lima Barreto and Euclides da Cunha Brazilian literary collections of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.