City, history and socio-spat ial segregat ion in the novel “O moleque Ricardo”, by José Lins do Rego

Abstract

This article focuses on the examination of the fourth novel by the writer José Lins do Rego, trying to show how the narrator in the novel abandons the sugarcane landscape from the interior of the Northeast, and introduces as central locus of its fiction a big Northeastern city, more precisely, Recife from the early 1920s. We seek to highlight how the writer - an exponent of the generation that forms the social novel of the 1930s - exposes the turbulent and exclusive ambience of a big city, with its subaltern types, its social division of labor and its political conf licts.