ABSTRACT:
This article's aim is to present and discuss what changes the research in primary sources can produce in traditional ideas rooted in the field of Letters. It will resume investigations that I carried out at different times, always supported by researching in archives. The text will be subdivided into three parts, in which I will comment on three assertions taken as facts before they were confronted with documents and historical data. The first of them is the one that claims Portuguese "literatura de cordel" is the source from which derives the "literatura de folhetos" from the Northeastern part of Brazil. The second states that literate culture in the colonial period was precarious or almost null in Brazil. And the third asserts that the history of literature develops itself within national borders, and should have authors and texts as its central elements.
KEYWORDS:
history of literature; international circulation of printed matter; literate culture; Northeastern “literatura de folhetos”; Portuguese “literature de cordel”