“An Excellent Debut”: the Arrival of the Proletarian Novel in Brazil

Abstract

With Parque industrial, launched in São Paulo at the beginning of 1933 under the pseudonym Mara Lobo, young Patrícia Galvão (1910-1962), then known by the name Pagu, signed, without any aspirations for a literary career, the first “proletarian novel” published in Brazil. Although it remained largely overlooked, if not concealed in literary history until its first reissue in 1981- and the rediscovery of the author dates back to the same period - the novel was the subject of diligent and attentive reception before Cacau by Jorge Amado appeared a few months later, capturing the debate surrounding the proletarian novel. Examining this critical fortune, accompanied by a recontextualization of the work through the author's biography, allows us to better understand Pagu's public image and her place in the literary and cultural field. It is also possible to reassess the singularity and potentialities of a text that surprisingly combines the criteria of politically engaged literature in the service of communist struggle and those of avant-garde literature, assimilating the formal and stylistic heritage of the modernist movement in which the author had taken her first steps.