A edição de cartas de escritores e intelectuais portugueses para Afrânio Peixoto

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the philological edition of fifty-six letters from the personal archive of Júlio Afrânio Peixoto, sent to him by Portuguese writers and intellectuals throughout the first half of the twentieth century. These documents are part of Peixoto‘s passive correspondence and reveal significant aspects of the intellectual and cultural relations between Brazil and Portugal, as well as the author‘s prestige within the Luso-Brazilian academic sphere. The research is guided by the following question: how can one edit the correspondence sent by Portuguese intellectuals to Afrânio Peixoto, considering the sociology of these texts and their relationship with the author‘s literary and philological production? The hypothesis is that such letters, as social practices of writing, constitute valuable documents for understanding the networks of Luso-Brazilian intellectual exchange in the early twentieth century, as well as the political and cultural role played by Afrânio Peixoto in this context. The study is justified by the lack of systematic research on this unpublished set of documents and by the importance of their edition for the fields of Textual Criticism, Epistolography, and History. The methodology is based on the principles of pragmatic philology and adopts a qualitative approach grounded in documentary identification and analysis, material description, thematic survey, and interpretative editing. The results confirm that the correspondence in question not only highlights Afrânio Peixoto‘s prestige in Portugal but also reveals the circulation of ideas between writers and scholars of both countries, reflecting tensions and affinities in the political-cultural landscape of the time. The edition of these letters offers a model for the philological treatment of epistolary sources and contributes to the valorization of the archive and the expansion of studies on cultural relations between Brazil and Portugal. It is concluded that the edition of Afrânio Peixoto‘s Portuguese correspondence enables methodological and theoretical advances in the field of contemporary philology, reinforcing the role of the editor as a critical agent and cultural mediator. Furthermore, the research contributes to the democratization of access to historical-literary documents and to a deeper understanding of intellectual networks in the Lusophone Atlantic.