No tempo de Antonio Conselheiro. Figuras e fatos da campanha de Canudos

A brief miscellany by a specialist in back-country folklore. The first essay examines Euclides da Cunha’s half jest that there was no place for women in his work. The second concerns the curious assertions (made to Gilberto Amado in 1911) of Siqueira de Menezes, one of the few army officers eulogized in Os sertões, that his key role in the final phase of the campaign against the backlanders was a figment of the author’s imagination, that Cunha was not present during the campaign, and that he had never met him. Sr. Calasans effectively refutes each contention but fails to explore the reasons why the engineer-turned-politican wished to forget his past. Besides a collection of doggerel inspired by the conselheirista movement, the remainder of the book includes a suggestive essay on the revival of Sebastianism in the interior in the 1890’s, a short vocabulary of jagungo terms associated with the campaign, and the book’s most useful feature, an annotated bibliography (112 items) of contemporary and later works, fictional and factual, concerning the Canudos’ affair.