Contemporary Ones – The Backland, Literature and Tragedy

Abstract

There are many possible meanings, literal and literary, for the word backland. In this paper, I mainly stand out a more general topographic sense, linked to rurality, as highlighted is in entries like the one present in the dictionary Houaiss, to rehearse a reading of the tragic character of texts by contemporary authors, such as Ronaldo Correia de Brito. It starts from the backlands as toponymy, physical, subjective and imagined, a remarkable space in national fiction, which in the text presented here some considerations unfold about the refiguring of tragedy in contemporary Brazilian literature. Refiguration which allows the perception of multiple and heterogeneous experiences that, in the actual days, they mix up bodies, narratives, times and spaces, in order to allow new glances at controversial, and no less interesting concepts, like regional or regionalist literature.