Of leather and plastic: reports from another Brazilian outback region (sertão)

Abstract

This article intends to demonstrate how the work of writer Ronaldo Correia de Brito has insistently broken the delicate borders between the outback regions and the city; localism and cosmopolitanism; fixity and mobility; tradition and modernity. In his works Knife, Book of Men, Immoral Portraits and the novel Galilean, the discourses on the northeastern outback, a privileged environment in the author's fiction, are strained to the limit, almost always pointing to temporalities that sometimes either antagonize or overlap. The analysis of these confrontations is based especially on conceptual questions raised by Antonio Candido (1987), Ligia Chiappini (1995) and Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Júnior (2011) regarding representations of the Brazilian outback region (Sertão) in Brazilian prose.