Urban images of Goiás: views on the nineteenth and twentieth century literature

The subject’s starting point is from the production of naturalists who visited Goiás in the nineteenth century and through fiction: tales, poetry, and novels written in the last century, the discipline will seek to understand the formation of urban space in the region of Goiás. The objective is to cross Literature and History to better understand the formation of the cities of the State. To inquire about the representations of the city in the written scene constructed by literature is basically to read texts that read the city, considering not only the physical-geographical aspects (the urban landscape), the more specific cultural data, the customs, the human types, but also symbolic cartography, in which the imaginary, the history, the memory of the city and the city of memory intersect. It is finally, to consider the city as a speech, truly a language, once it speaks to its inhabitants, reveals to them it’s parts and it’s whole. We share Barthes' thinking that writers are the ones closest to the construction of an urban semiotics. The first nucleus settlement of the São Paulo’s captaincy dates from the beginning of the 18th century, the Arraial de Sant'Anna was founded in 1727, later called Vila Boa de Goiás and became the seat of the new captaincy's government, Meia Ponte ( In 1731, Crixás in 1734, Traíras and São José do Tocantins (Niquelândia) in 1735, São Félix in 1736, Jaraguá Stream (Jaraguá) in 1737 and Santa Luzia (Luziânia) in 1746. The pioneering travelers, usually Europeans, were interested in portraying Brazilian landscapes and cities in the nineteenth century, when they underwent major transformations. Transformations that did not reach all the cities of the former colony. The city of Goiás is an example. With the gold ore depletion many of its inhabitants moved to other regions of the country. Changes throughout the 19th century were extremely slow in the landscape of the cities of Goiás. The Brazilian city of the nineteenth century was the protagonist in the traveler’s paintings, where it appears with its streets and houses denoting a regional variation which attracts, even more the eye of the foreign artist. Thomas Ender, the Austrian artist who toured the lands Goiás, was one of those who portrayed the towns and villages of the Province. In most of his works the buildings appeared on the horizon, with the sky above and wide open spaces below, which allows to see in detail the architecture offering an overview of the buildings. The artist’s city is the colonial city built in the eighteenth century, before the transformations that occurred in them in the nineteenth century. Another artist from Austria who also visited the Province of Goiás was Johann Emmanuel Pohl from December 1818 to June 1819. William John Burchell, an English traveler, who visited Brazil from 1825 and was in Goiás in 1828, while making his way to Belém, produced some icnographic accounts of the cities in the Province of Goiás, highlighting the works on the city of Goiás. Oscar Leal, a traveler of Portuguese ancestry, was one of the last to pass through Goiás as early as 1882 and, unlike his predecessors; he no longer speaks of decadence, but of progress. Since the Imperial family moved from Portugal to Brazil in 1808 and Dom Joao VI decreed the opening of the Brazilian ports, foreign travelers began to visit the country frequently with the colony. There are more than 260 literacy works in various languages on the inhabitants, social life, habits and customs, fauna, flora and other aspects of the former Portuguese colony. These narratives help us compose a map of Brazilian life from the 16th to the 19th centuries, as they describe aspects of the land, people, customs and habits. The nineteenth-century travelers who visited Goiás in order to understand the rhythm of life of the population of the then Province contributed their reports to better knowing the cities that have been erected here.