Machado de Assis e Silvio Romero

escravismo, “raça” e cientificismo em tempos de campanha abolicionista (década de 1880)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore the historicity and disagreements
around the abolitionism and the presence of the “black race” in
Brazil in the late nineteenth century, essentially in the 1880s, in the work
of Machado de Assis (1839-1911) and Sílvio Romero (1849-1914). In
that period, the great public debates revolved around the literary phenomenon,
which is the reason why it was decided to investigate the way
the slavery and the abolitionism and the scientific racism appear in the
texts of the historian and literary critic Sílvio Romero, as well as in the
literary production of Machado de Assis. Both of them were prestigious
names in the Respublica litterarum and would become founding partners
of the Academia Brasileira de Letras in 1897, despite deep intellectual and
political differences, which this paper seeks to investigate.