“O Canto Genetlíaco”, by Alvarenga Peixoto: Between the 18th-century rhetoric and the political independence

• Autor(a) principal: Esteves de Souza, Caio Cesar
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Antíteses
• Texto Completo: https://ojs.uel.br/revistas/uel/index.php/antiteses/article/view/45336
• topic: Alvarenga Peixoto; Poética e retórica; Século XVIII; Arcadismo; Inconfidência Mineira; Literatura Brasileira; Literatura Portuguesa; Poética e Retórica; Alvarenga Peixoto; Poetics and Rhetoric; 18th century; Arcadism; Inconfidência Mineira

This article discusses Alvarenga Peixoto’s “Canto Genetlíaco”, a poem produced in 1789, in Minas Gerais, to celebrate the birth of D. José Tomás de Menezes. We set the poem in dialogue withsome major 18th-century treatises of poetics and rhetoric that regulated the production of poetry at the time both in Brazil and Portugal. The poem is read in relation to the writings of Verney, Francisco Pina de Sá e de Melo, and Bento Rodrigo Pereira de Soto-Maior Menezes. What we aim to demonstrate is how the poem perfectly fits the European poetic.If it can be read as a “nativist” discourse, it is simply because such “nativism” was a constitutive part of the expectations for that genre of poetry in the late 18th-century Luso-Brazilian tradition – that would be reappropriated by men of letters in the context of the Brazilian independence as a sign of protonationalism.