Iracema’s Country: Nature from the Mid-1800s to the Present in Ceará, Brazil

Iracema, Legend of Ceará (1865) is a canonical work from Brazilian Romanticism, written by José de Alencar (1829–77), and one of the most popular literary works published in Brazil. Together with O Guarani (1857) and Ubirajara (1874), it comprises Alencar’s expression of “Indianism.” “Indianism” (in Portuguese indianismo), which had its heyday in Brazil between 1835 and 1888, is a literary and artistic movement “described as a more or less uniform and static phenomenon, whose language, imagery, and central protagonist, the Indian ‘knight’, were definitively fixed by Gonçalves Dias and José de Alencar” (Treece 57). Inspired by the aesthetics of European Romanticism, this literary trend converged with contemporary politics to formulate the ideology of the Brazilian national state, recently independent after 400 years of Portuguese colonization. A patriotic image of homeland predominated. “Indianism” may be seen as a precursor of “indigenism,” an important part of the artistic avant-garde and progressive political movements of the twentieth century in Latin America (Tarica).