The Ways of the Novel in Brazil - 18th and 19th centuries is an interdisciplinary research project, sponsored by FAPESP, carried out with the collaboration of two Literature professors (Márcia Abreu - IEL/UNICAMP and Sandra Guardini T. Vasconcelos - FFLCH/USP), two History professors (Nelson Schapochnik - FE/USP and Luiz Carlos Villalta - FAFICH/UFMG) and their students. Having as its temporal markers the second half of the 18th century and the end of the 19th, the project intends to investigate the rise and consolidation of the novel in Brazil, by means of the examination of the novels which circulated in our country, of the practices of reading they produced and the spaces where these practices took place.

The following aspects will be looked into:

1. the reading of novels by the censors in charge of examining the convenience of their publication in Portuguese or of their admission in Brazil, using as sources the reports written between the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th;
2. the composition of private libraries and the book market between the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, with special emphasis on the presence of novels in these collections, examined in the light of the socioeconomic and cultural status of the owners of books in Portuguese America;
3. the establishment of the contexts of reception of the novel in 19th-century Brazil, through the study of circulating libraries, public libraries, associate libraries;
4. the relations between the 19th-century Brazilian novel and the English novel of the 18th and 19th centuries, as part of the history of the formation of the Brazilian novel.