A Leitura do Literário no Brasil: Tensões e contradições establecidas nas práticas de leitura

It is critically consider issues related to Brazilians’ literary education,analyzing how their reader’s history was built (and the myth of the nonreader),in a reading practice sociology approach. We seek to understandwho the readership of colonial Brazil was until the early twentieth century,and how the transition of a European culture consumer’s country to acountry that produces its own culture was. Four major events thatcontributed to promote the reading culture in Brazil are discussed: a) thecensorship abolition in 1820; b) the end of the government monopoly overthe press in 1821; c) the establishment of higher education in Brazil in 1827;d) investments in public education, particularly for women, around 1834; e)the professionalization of writers. The story of the book and readers’education were constituted between the habit of servitude and the desire forfreedom