João do Rio a forgotten chronicler within the Machado-Euclides dichotomy

Abstract

This paper analyzes how the process of Brazilian literary canonization in the 1930s excluded the chronicler João do Rio from the national canon. It argues that critic Cassiano Ricardo, by consolidating an analytical dichotomy between Machado de Assis and Euclides da Cunha as “ideal types”, established a critical paradigm that marginalized divergent aesthetics. Based on this historiographical opposition and on an examination of João do Rio’s journalistic chronicles, this study investigates how his writing evades such parameters. It demonstrates that, despite being labeled as a writer of the cosmopolitan “littoral”, João do Rio formulated a social reading deeply rooted in the Brazilian experience by narrating the history and agency of marginalized subjects and obscure heroes of Rio de Janeiro’s Belle Époque.