[Failure of the form or vision of the country in A Confederação dos Tamoios

Considering the differences between A Confederação dos Tamoios’s first (1856) and second (1864) editions this paper intends to show that what critic and literary history use to see as a failure was due, compared to the dominant ideas in the middle 19th century, to a less rigid conception of epic and to a view less heroic and more violent of Brazilian history.

KEYWORDS
Gonçalves de Magalhães; Brazilian romantic epic; literature and Brazilian history