Direito e literatura: uma abordagem interdisciplinar em Capitães da areia, romance de Jorge Amado

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the relationship between Law and Literature, electing the book Capitães da areia (1937), by Jorge Amado, as the object of analysis in order to address the issue of abandoned and excluded children under the legislation from the time it was published, the Código de Menores from 1926, in parallel to the current protection law, namely Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente, from 1990. Studies on interdisciplinarity between these two fields of knowledge are concentrated in researching Law as a narrative - checking the discursive aspects of legal texts - or Law in Literature. This work focuses on the latter, which is designed to identify how literary works accommodate the understanding of a legal system from a certain historic period. Thus, it relies on the premise that Literature provides a glimpse of a certain social environment, which in turn is the substrate for the development of Law, which aims at ordering the society. Capitães da areia, while addressing as its theme street children - abandoned, orphaned or abused - denounces the marginalization and repression suffered by them, also presenting to the reader the social context of Salvador city in the early twentieth century. Thus, the novel provides subsidies to investigate the legal basis of juvenile delinquency control mechanisms used at that time, also allowing a dialogue with today's legal text - the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente. As literary-sociological theoretical background, this work prioritizes the studies conducted by Antonio Candido, Massaud Moisés, Marisa Lajolo, Lucien Goldmann and Georg Lukács. Regarding interdisciplinarity between Law and Literature, this research is based on the analysis undertaken by André Karam Trindade, Roberta Magalhães Gubert and Arnaldo Sampaio de Moraes Godoy.