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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. 112–137

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 Brazilian historiography of slavery and abolition. It is also framed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of sentiment and the conventions of sentimental writing. Drawing on Lynn Festa’s work on sentimental writing under British and French imperialism, sentiment is adopted here as a supple tool of analysis that permits a discursive and historical disentangling of Reis’s literary treatment of slavery and abolition.
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
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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