The text analyzes the Small history of Brazilian literature, by Ronald de Carvalho, looking to explicate its intellectual context: on one hand, the tradition of literary historiography from which the book inherits its main references and conventions; on the other, the contemporary critical reflection on the direction in which Brazilian culture and society were heading and on which the modernist sensibility and imagination fed. This methodological strategy enables a discussion in how, based on the defence of the "simplicity" of literary language - whose particular meaning is also described in this article - the book contributed to making an agenda of aesthetic and cultural renewal routine
Modernism; Literary historiography; Aesthetic renewal; National construction; Culture and society in Brazil