The consolidation of the cearense literary field and the public reader in the end of the 19th Century

the case of the Padaria Espiritual and other groups of men of letters

Abstract

At the end of the 19th century, in a context of economic and political decline in the state of Ceará – as well as throughout the North and Northeast regions of Brazil – despite the increasingly scarce resources, there was an intense and fruitful artistic activity, especially the literary, in Fortaleza. Groups of intellectuals and men of letters competed among themselves in the founding of associations, literary movements, spaces of artistic, intellectual and even scientific sociability, in which they discussed various subjects, particularly the literary ones. Literature, therefore, assumed a central role in the creation of an atmosphere and in the constitution of a true literary field, which allowed the accumulation of symbolic capital in the form of habitus and that the writer had considerable social role in the formation of a readership. In this article, we seek to investigate how such groups of literary men, in particular the Spiritual Bakery movement, were extremely important for the history of the literature of Ceará, due to the maintenance of literary magazines and journals carried by these groups.