Nesta tese desenvolve-se o conceito literatura da urgência para definir o tipo de escrita realizado sob estados de emergência, situações-limite: no caso específico de Lima Barreto, serve de base para a análise do Diário do hospício produzido pelo autor em 1919-20, quando esteve internado no hospício Pedro II, no Rio de Janeiro. Demonstra-se como esta literatura nasceu conspurcada, contaminada pela loucura e pela rotina no manicômio, sendo simultaneamente uma escrita de si (conceito de Foucault) criada para defender o eu acuado ante a instituição e um documento de valor histórico capaz de denunciar, pelo viés do paciente, minúcias do dia-a-dia psiquiátrico normalmente ausentes da literatura oficial do hospício. Desvela-se ainda como esta urgência contagiou outros escritos de Lima Barreto, tornando-o autor de uma literatura-alforria que transgrediu códigos e esgarçou limites entre vida e obra, pele branca e negra, pobreza e riqueza, ignorância e cultura, literatura popular e erudita, lucidez e loucura. / This thesis develops the concept literature of urgency to define a type of writing produced in some kind of emergency, in situations that are really close to the edge: in Lima Barretos specific case this is the basis to the analysis of Diário do hospício (Hospices diary) written by the author in 1919-20, while he was a patient in the psychiatric hospital Pedro II, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It demonstrates how this literature has appeared already contaminated by insanity and by the hospitals routine, constituting simultaneously a self-writting (lécriture de soi, a Foucaults concept) created to defend a trapped ego dealing with the institution and a document of historical value that accuses, from de the patients point of view, details of the psychiatric routine normally absent from the hospices official literature. This thesis shows how this urgency has contaminated other Barretos writings, contributing to make him the author of a literature-liberation which violated codes and enlarged the limits between life and work, white and black skin, poverty and wealth, ignorance and culture, popular and scholar literature, lucidity and insanity.

Nesta tese desenvolve-se o conceito literatura da urgência para definir o tipo de escrita realizado sob estados de emergência, situações-limite: no caso específico de Lima Barreto, serve de base para a análise do Diário do hospício produzido pelo autor em 1919-20, quando esteve internado no hospício Pedro II, no Rio de Janeiro. Demonstra-se como esta literatura nasceu conspurcada, contaminada pela loucura e pela rotina no manicômio, sendo simultaneamente uma escrita de si (conceito de Foucault) criada para defender o eu acuado ante a instituição e um documento de valor histórico capaz de denunciar, pelo viés do paciente, minúcias do dia-a-dia psiquiátrico normalmente ausentes da literatura oficial do hospício. Desvela-se ainda como esta urgência contagiou outros escritos de Lima Barreto, tornando-o autor de uma literatura-alforria que transgrediu códigos e esgarçou limites entre vida e obra, pele branca e negra, pobreza e riqueza, ignorância e cultura, literatura popular e erudita, lucidez e loucura. / This thesis develops the concept literature of urgency to define a type of writing produced in some kind of emergency, in situations that are really close to the edge: in Lima Barretos specific case this is the basis to the analysis of Diário do hospício (Hospices diary) written by the author in 1919-20, while he was a patient in the psychiatric hospital Pedro II, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It demonstrates how this literature has appeared already contaminated by insanity and by the hospitals routine, constituting simultaneously a self-writting (lécriture de soi, a Foucaults concept) created to defend a trapped ego dealing with the institution and a document of historical value that accuses, from de the patients point of view, details of the psychiatric routine normally absent from the hospices official literature. This thesis shows how this urgency has contaminated other Barretos writings, contributing to make him the author of a literature-liberation which violated codes and enlarged the limits between life and work, white and black skin, poverty and wealth, ignorance and culture, popular and scholar literature, lucidity and insanity.

Sensation fiction, which flourished in England from the 1850s to the 1880s, was viewed by Victorian establishment figures as a threat to prevailing social values. This dissertation focuses on the work of Charles Reade, who along with Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was among the most well-known sensation novelists. While several novels by Collins and Braddon have been rediscovered by scholars since the 1980s, Reade's fiction remains neglected. With its explicit critique of the emerging regimes of power/knowledge in the fields of medicine, criminal justice, and sexual mores, Reade's work anticipates Michel Foucault's theories elaborated a century later. Although previous readings of Victorian fiction have drawn on the ideas of Foucault in an attempt to identify sensation novels as cultural productions complicit with a developing bourgeois hegemony, I argue that these novels represent a narrative genre that challenges and resists these disciplinary constraints. In addition, Reade's work provides a rare glimpse of alternative sexualities and gender identities in nineteenth-century fiction that can be read in light of feminist and gender theory. This dissertation recovers the fiction of Charles Reade as a body of work that anticipates recent trends in literary and cultural theory and that speaks to us today with an uncanny familiarity.