Novels without Borders

The novel has been equated with modernity itself (Magris 2015) as ‘the only genre to have emerged under the conditions of epistemological and historiographic self-consciousness that characterize the modern period’ (McKeon 2000, 254). From its inception, this most migratory of literary forms has enabled an intense and intensive process of exchange, with novels informing other novels, with novelists creating, borrowing, appropriating or challenging subject matter, narrative techniques and devices. Language has never been an insurmountable barrier, translation having been a powerful tool facilitating its spread over space and time. This modern genre made its entrance into Brazilian ports in the early nineteenth century and soon came to be adopted as a major instrument in the effort to inquire into a national identity. However, the novel's movement in space also entailed a displacement in time, thus making collide two uneven and combined temporalities – the developed European centre, already bourgeois and industrialised (notwithstanding its internal differences), and the peripheral country, newly out of colonial rule and involved in its construction as a nation. The rise of the Brazilian novel owed much to what Brazilian writer Machado de Assis has phrased ‘external influx’ (Assis 1992b, 813) in a process that has been characterised by one critic as the ‘permanent mixture of European tradition and the discoveries about Brazil’ (Candido 2017, 29). This chapter explores the particular contributions of the gothic to Brazilian fiction and examines how its conventions have been deployed to deal with aspects of Brazilian life that the project of nation-building silenced. Gothic ideas and trappings were functional to acknowledge the presence of the country's Other – the enslaved, in this case – and express the anxieties this presence entailed. Gothic flowed over the English borders and crossed the seas to become globalised. As the appropriation of its conventions in nineteenth-century Brazil suggests, ‘globalgothic’ is a term that need not refer exclusively to the contemporary context and can have its spatio-temporal coordinates expanded.

Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822 was the beginning of a long process of nation-building, whose underpinning was ‘the disparity between the slave society of Brazil and the principles of European liberalism’ (Schwarz 1992b, 19). With the enforcement of Portuguese as the country's official language by statesman Marquês de Pombal in 1758, oral culture, which had prevailed during colonial times – even settlers and enslaved Africans spoke ‘tupi’ (the general Indigenous language) – became