Between the Sublime and the Beautiful: The Aesthetic Representations About the Araguaia River

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the aesthetic representations about the Araguaia River. The hypothesis is that the aesthetic narratives on the river, in the nineteenth century until the first half of the twentieth century, were worth the aesthetics of the sublime; after the second half of the twentieth century, when nature became, to use a humanized expression of Anthony Giddens, the aesthetic accounts of the river emphasized bucolic beauty. The reflection on the beautiful and the sublime was based on the writings of Edmund Burke and Emmanuel Kant; on the representation of nature, used texts by Georg Simmel and Keith Thomas. The sources for the analysis of the representations were reports (such as those of Conde de Castelnau, Couto de Magalhães, Jacintho Lacomme and Hermano Ribeiro da Silva) and songs about the Araguaia river (composed by Tião Carreiro e Pardinho, Irmãs Freitas, Marcelo Barra and Amauri Garcia).