Authors:

Abstract

Being a highly ambitioned genre in Latin American literature during Romanticism, epic poetry has heroicity as one of its defining features. This article analyses how two Latin American Indianist epic poems – “I-Juca-Pirama” (1851), by the Brazilian Antônio Gonçalves Dias, and Tabaré (1888), by the Uruguayan Juan Zorilla de San Martín – present convergent problems and solutions in the shaping of Indian epic heroes. The recognition of the excellence of a new kind of hero, whose heroicity is based on his/her subjectivity, cannot take place on the diegetic level and is only possible by means of complicity, understood as a sharing of ethical values, between hero, reader and, in the case of Tabaré, narrator.

Keywords: epic poetry ,   Romanticism ,   Brazilian Literature ,   Uruguayan Literature ,   hero ,   Gonçalves Dias ,   Zorilla de San Martín  

How to Cite: Machado Nunes, M. and Brunke, D., 2018. Leitor, narrador, herói: cumplicidade na poesia épica do Romantismo latinoamericano. Latin American Literary Review, 45(89). DOI: http://doi.org/10.26824/lalr.29