A past-present in A Rainha dos Cárceres da Grécia [The Queen of Prisons of Greece]

Abstract

The novel by Osman Lins, The Queen of Prisons of Greece, published in 1976, brings to the reader a relation between time and space very particular as it brings the period of Dutch Colonization in Brazilian Northeast at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The present paper aims to read the way it happens in the very structure of the novel, considering the landscapes painted during that time by dutch artists, mainly by Frans Post. Brining this remote past to the present of the narrative through the superposing of landscapes, the novel allows us to think the present through elements that nowadays figure as important items from Brazilian iconography, putting in perspective and questioning parameters that are relatively stable from the traditional history’s point of view.