Ricardo Lourenço - A Dança dos Ossos

The origins of Luso-Brazilian popular literature with timeless themes: crime, the supernatural, romance.

The genesis of the Gothic movement is found in Germany in the 18th century (the ballad "Lenore," by Gottfried August Bürger, is considered the genre's founding work). As never before, in a kind of unstoppable wave, the fashion spread throughout Europe and the Western world. The reasons combined to justify this success: the printed book became more widespread, thus becoming more affordable; with greater access to writing sources and pioneering educational projects, a large part of the population began to have closer contact with a basic education that was previously simply nonexistent; writers thus found, for the first time, a proper market, adapting, in an unprecedented context, their production to a growing demand.

In this way, the genesis of detective fiction, fantasy, science fiction, action literature, or even so-called romantic literature is found in Gothic literature. In the Portuguese-speaking world, translations of Ann Radcliffe, Frédéric Soulié, and many of the early Gothic bestsellers arrived in the 19th century, and the movement somehow blended with ultra-romanticism.In this anthology, prepared by Ricardo Lourenço, we find a generous sample of the great exponents of the genre in the Portuguese-Brazilian universe, cataloging a range of themes that came to mark all popular literature of the following centuries and that still maintain a vigorous relevance today.