An Inventory of Football Stories: The Foreigner and the Woman in Brazilian Anthologies

Abstract

This article aims to present the eighteen major anthologies of football stories circulating in Brazil, such as Entre as quatro linhas (2013), organized by Luiz Ruffato; 22 contistas em campo (2006) and Onze em campo (1986), both organized by Flávio Moreira da Costa, taking into consideration some of their paratexts, mainly preface, summary, title, references, name, and authorship notes, according to Gérard Genette’s theory. Parallel to this introduction, we stress two major issues related to comparative studies and to the domain of football: first, we mention the occurrence of foreign authors in some of the anthologies, which allows us to highlight the tension between the local vs. the global, present in football narratives since the sport arrived in Brazil. Secondly, there is the very low number of stories published by women in relation to men, among them Rachel de Queiroz, Hilda Hilst, Edla van Steen, Edy Lima, Adriana Lisboa, and Tatiana Salem Levy, raising issues related to women’s participation both in football and in the literary discourse that thematizes it. Such aspects reveal how football and literature (also edition) relate, as they enact and reflect sociocultural aspects of contemporary subjects.