Pequenos futuros trabalhadores: reflexões sobre as personagens infantis de José Lins do Rego e Jorge Amado (1930-1937)

Abstract

This dissertation investigates children and adolescents in the works Menino de Engenho (1932), Doidinho (1933) and O moleque Ricardo (1935), by José Lins do Rego, as well as Jubiabá (1935) and Capitães da Areia (1937), by Jorge Amado. Childhood and adolescence were mobilized by these novelists in a context in which a considerable group of writers publicly expressed the need to write about the Brazilian people, contrasting homogeneous views on children and adolescents, in vogue in the 1930s. Considering the particularities of each author, as well as the context in which the novels were written, the research analyzes the experiences shared between child characters, crossing what was found in these novels with what appeared about the lives of minors in the commercial press, especially in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Jornal. In this way, we sought to understand the forms of resistance of these boys and girls to situations in which their freedom was threatened. To this end, the key analysis of this research was to map how aspects related to class, gender and color interfered in the dilemmas experienced by these minors.