Cultura impressa e prática leitora protestante no Oitocentos

Abstract

In the second half of the XIX century, the establishment of protestant missions originated from Europe and the United States caused meaningful changes in the Brazilian religious and cultural scenario. The printed word would become, thus, an efficient ally of the gospel ideal by favoring it in, at least, three aspects: dissemination of gospel advertisement; circulation of information about missionary activities of the historical denominations and the doctrinaire instruction of the faithful through reading. In this printed set, the newspapers started constituting a meaningful cultural artifact by means of which several literary genres circulated and were read. Therefore, we appropriated the protestant newspaper as main source of the current research with the aim to fulfill a historical rescue of gospel reading practices in the 1800s that were made silent in the main literary manuals and of the history of Brazilian printing. From the theoretical fundamentals of the Cultural History, especially the concepts of practice, appropriation and representation, formulated by Roger Chartier, we propose to investigate the way how the Protestants made use of literary genres and models of the secular printing to produce a printed set of utilitarian character. By focusing our analysis on the pages of the first protestant Brazilian newspaper, the Imprensa Evangélica (1864), we intended to verify the categories of authorship, translation, works and readers in order to reflect on how content and materiality merge (CHARTIER, 2009), history and literature are intertwined (LUCA, 2011) in an attempt to reconstruct, avoiding anachronism, the formation of a protestant literary system by means of regular production.