Silva, Ana Cláudia Suriani da; Paixão, Alexandro Henrique; (2025) Délia’s Short Stories and the Forbidden Passions. In: Silva, Ana Cláudia Suriani da and Luca, Tania Regina de, (eds.) Foreword: Women Journalists in the Rio de Janeiro Belle Époque. Tamesis: London. (In press).

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Abstract

In this chapter, we will present aspects of the life and literary work, particularly the short stories, of Délia, the pseudonym of Brazilian writer Maria Câmara Bormann (Porto Alegre, 25/11/1853–Rio de Janeiro, 23/07/1895) published in O País. We shall begin with a brief account of her biography and her fictional work and go on to present the methodology of the ‘keywords’ and the term ‘structure of feeling’, to be used here to explain Délia’s short story, ‘Sensitiva’, published on 4 January 1892. Our aim is to comment on and interpret one of Delia’s short stories through a literary-historical analysis of a fragment of her writing. It will therefore be necessary to refer to examples from Brazilian romantic literature from the late nineteenth century, such as the fantastic short stories by forgotten romantic writer Luiz Nicolau Fagundes Varella (Rio Claro-RJ, 1841–Niterói-RJ, 1875); or indeed other literary references, even when presented in passing, such as the ‘cult of passions’ of the 1600s or the Byronian style of the 1800s. These and other literary elements will be engaged and combined with a theoretical-methodological framework drawn from different fields of knowledge, including: the literary criticism of Antonio Candido, the philology of Erich Auerbach, the sociology of culture of Raymond Williams and Levin Schückïng and the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. From the latter, we will relate a case of hysteria analysed by Freud in order to compare it to the meanings and values represented in literary form by Délia, with the aim of reflecting on a text and its context interacting dynamically.

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