O insólito no Sertão contemporâneo: elementos do realismo maravilhoso em A Cabeça do Santo de Socorro Acioli.

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze how the elements of Northeastern popular religiosity contribute to the presence of magical realism in the novel A cabeça do santo (2014) by Socorro Acioli. The aim is to identify the unusual events present in the work and analyze how popular religiosity influences their acceptance, considering that these events, even transcending natural laws, are considered part of reality in this narrative. This paper is configured as a bibliographical research and is based on a basic methodology, without practical application. Additionally, it has a qualitative approach. For that, we elaborate a theoretical basis that starts from the conceptualization of the unusual, as well as the fantastic, strange and marvelous in literature, based on Todorov (1980), Roas (2014), Petrov (2016) and Maciel (2021); from the concept of the marvelous real and its relationship with the Latin American continent from Carpentier (2010), which deals with the cultural and religious influences of the continent on Latin American literary production; the adaptation of the concept of marvelous real to literary studies under the name of marvelous realism from Chiampi (1980), Santos and Borges (2018), Schøllhammer (2004, 2009), Rodrigues (2009) and Iegelski (2021); as well as the contributions of Cascudo (2006) about oral literature in Brazil. This research brings contributions to the studies of marvelous realism, more specifically in contemporary Brazilian literature, bringing Northeastern literature to the center of the debate. In addition to promoting an academic approach to a work that is underexplored in this context.