INTELLECTUALS, LITERATURE AND STRUCTURES OF POWER IN THE 19TH CENTURY

Abstract

When understanding the intellectual as a complex man, we analyze here the different performances he did over time, especially in the 19th century and in different spaces. Literature in different spatial and historical contexts was established as a research vehicle. First, it investigates the relationship of writers with state power, whose stance unfolds, on a side, in movements such as modernism and the masses, and on the other side, in the complex networks of censorship. A posteriori, the discursive games behind clashes between anticlerical deism and Catholic fideism are approached, with analysis of positions in the press and, in particular, in the thesis images of two diametrically opposed novels: A religiosa (1796), by the Enlightenment Denis Diderot, and Lionello (1856), by the Jesuit Antonio Bresciani. Such works, although they are temporarily distant, diverge about the anti-Catholic polemic that began in the Century of Lights, with deep reverberations in the 19th century.

Keywords: Literature; intellectuals; Enlightenment; Jesuitism; censorship.