The history of football and literature in Brazil (1908-1938)

This article explores the emergence of literary texts in Brazil that centre on the relatively new practice of football in the early decades of the 20th century. Primarily published in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the nation’s centres of football practice and literary production, these texts mediated competing visions of the place of football in Brazilian society, and of Brazil itself. Through a combination of textual analysis and socio-political contextualisation, we see how a number of the country’s key literary figures—male and female—drew on football to construct a sense of nation for the new Republic, and their place within it.