Artisan of self, artisan of history

edification and ruin in the work of Capistrano de Abreu

Abstract

This article analyses one of the least emphasized aspects in the current interpretation of Capistrano de Abreu’s work, in the last twenty years of his life, his affiliation with the aesthetic trends and world views of Romanticism, remarkably present in Brazilian literature and culture during the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of twentheenth century. In the quest for this way, we retrace briefly the travel road of a “poetics of ruins” and its close connection with the author’s vision of history and, closer to the author of Chapter’s of Colonial History, to Goethe and Bildung. Such affinities are pointed in some Capistrano de Abreu letter’s and his “self –fashioning”.