Following the model of the Académie Française, the Academia Brasileira de Letras (ABL) was founded in 1897 in order to congregate Brazil’s most eminent writers; it remains to this day a very prestigious institution. Due to its importance in the Brazilian Belle Époque, historians of the period (including Nicolau Sevcenko, Jeffrey Needell, and Roberto Ventura) have interpreted the academy’s early years in relation to its broader intellectual and cultural context. But more recently, young scholars like Alessandra El Far have turned to close studies of the institution itself. This is the case in Rodrigues’s careful study, derived from his master’s thesis at UNICAMP. Focusing on the first 15 years of the academy, the book critiques the academy’s project as a “depoliticized” and purely literary institution. Such a project envisioned an honorary association dedicated to safeguarding the Portuguese language and Brazilian literary tradition and thus devoid of “politics,” both in the...

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