Literatura, esportes e regionalismo no Brasil: O Grande Desportista, de Pascoal Toti Filho

Abstract

Studies that analyze fictional books on sports have highlighted how these publications carry the potential to encode and disseminate perceptions that express values about this practice. In Brazil, such analyzes have emphasized the use of literature as a tool for articulating national identity, by overestimating the roles of books and writers from metropolitan areas, while concealing, nonetheless, the regional diversity that affected this field of activities. Besides works by famous literary names or those published in Brazilian metropolitan centers, a fictional and journalistic sports literature bloomed in regions of the Brazilian hinterland, as well. With the purpose of revealing such diversity, this article presents and analyzes Pascoal Toti Filho’s book O grande desportista (The Great Sportsman), published in 1922, in Uberaba, Minas Gerais. This article emphasizes gender and geopolitical relations between the capital of São Paulo and the countryside of Minas Gerais – two easily detachable themes, taken here as elements of historical analysis in the given novel.