MANUEL FERREIRA E A CRÍTICA DA LITERATURA CABO-VERDIANA

Abstract

This article revisits the main postulates of the criticism and theory, which, between 1940 and 1980, discuss the function, the evolution and the canon of the Cape Verdean literature. The analysis of the founding texts by Manuel Ferreira leads to the inscription of his principles in the historiographical paradigm of the 19th century. This model is reproduced – and sometimes contested – in articles by José Osório de Oliveira (1944), Amílcar Cabral (1952), Pedro da Silveira (1954), Gabriel Mariano (1959), Alfredo Margarido (1960), Jaime de Figueiredo (1961), Arnaldo França (1961) or Onésimo Silveira (1963). The last phase of Manuel Ferreira’s literary criticism reveals, on one hand, the adoption of new principles of the aesthetic of reception, of the transnational intertextuality, of the mythocritics and of the myth analysis; and confirms, on the other hand, the maintenance of the option for a criticism and a literature of historical, Marxist and nationalist affirmation.