Bom-Crioulo de Adolfo Caminha particularidades de uma representação naturalista do homoerotismo e de sua recepção literária

Abstract

This text analyses the reception to the naturalist novel  Bom-crioulo from Adolfo Caminha and the several possibilities of reading that it has permitted through more than one hundred years, aiming to understand how its representation of homoerotism was determinative to rise the interest of public as well the repulse from most part of critical, contemporary and also posterior. Published in 1895, the narrative runs in Monarchy times and relates the love relationship between two sailors, a runaway slave and a young white boy.  In a representation of naturalist values which we see as ambiguous, the narrative alternates moments of repulse against the relationship, based in that time scientific beliefs, and moments seen for several criticals as empathics to the leader character. In this article, we conclude that this ambiguity was responsible for the interest of readers at releasing as well for persecution and rejection to the novel that lasted decades.