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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Madeleine Dobie, Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI] 2024
► pp. 110–135

Chapter 6
Politics and faith, slavery and abolition in nineteenth-century Brazilian literature

Maria Firmina dos Reis’s Úrsula (1859) and A escrava (1887)

The first Brazilian abolitionist novel, Úrsula (1859), was written by a black woman, Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825–1917). Reis’s entire literary production was lost for over a century and discovery and recovery commenced only in the 1960s. This chapter examines Úrsula, and Reis’s short story A escrava [The slave woman] (1887). Úrsula was written in the decade following the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1850, while A escrava was written on the brink of the abolition of slavery (1888) and the fall of the monarchy (1889). The analysis presented here locates Reis’s writing within the history and historiography of slavery and abolition in nineteenth-century Brazil. Intellectually, this study also examines Reis's two texts through conventions of sentimental and Romantic writing, allowing a discursive and historical disentangling of her literary treatment of slavery and abolition. Culturally, it is argued that Reis's religious belief, as a Roman Catholic, was critical to her writing in ways that have been overlooked in the scholarship to date. Finally, it is proposed that as a descendant of enslaved Africans herself, Reis's anti-slavery writing belongs to the wider corpus of black women's writing across the Americas.
Keywords: Brazil, abolitionism, slavery, Christianity, sentimental novel
Article outline
  • Recovering emotions
  • Sentimental strategies
  • Beyond Christian rhetoric
  • Fraternity and piety
  • Africanity and loss
  • Tyranny and villainy
  • A praxis of non-violence
  • Resisting narratives of slavery
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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