The Persistence of Literary Regionalism in Crooked Plow

Abstract

This paper aims to situate Itamar Vieira Junior’s novel Crooked plow in the Brazilian regionalistic literary tradition. For that, we briefly review the history of the three phases of regionalism in order to establish the link of continuity and change of this subgenre through the concept of Residual Cultures, an idea first approached by Raymond Williams and then deepened by Roberto Pontes. Vieira Junior’s novel lies in the context of Neo-Regionalism, albeit it differentiates itself from other works because of its choice to abdicate from the urban representation in favor of resuming the representation of a rural country, the same approach as the 1930s regionalism. Vieira Junior’s approach thus retakes the idea of “Deep Brazil”, a cristallized idea in Brazilian social novel. Therefore, we may state that Regionalism as a literary form of critical representation of the Brazilian social issues resists as a residual form.