Abstract
Rejecting the aesthetic and thematic exuberance of the first phase of modernism in Brazil and reinforcing, from the 1930s onwards, through fiction, a gloomy mistrust of the social, economic and political changes that were taking place in the country at the beginning of the century, Cornélio Penna produced a fundamentally melancholic literature. Based on authors who reflected on the malaise of the modern man, this article investigates the devices through which that pessimistic melancholy dissolves in the construction of the plots and characters, in their spatial and subjective dimensions, of Penna’s first two novels, Fronteira (1935) and Dois romances de Nico Horta (1939).
Keywords:
Cornélio Penna; melancholy; Modernism; Borders; Psychological Novel