Images, memories and stories of petrolina/pe in the cordel traditional oral literature: literary configurations of city

Abstract

Petrolina is a city that presents a great cultural, economic and touristic importance for the valley of the São Francisco river, in the Northeast State of Pernambuco/Brazil. In this sense there are numerous literary works, in different genres, such as novels, poems, short stories and “cordéis” in which the imagens of the past or the present of the city are explored, exalting its culture and its History. In this paper we aim to reflect about the fictional representations of Petrolina expressed through the original oral Literature in the form of cordel. To fulfill our proposal, we analyze João Evódio Silva Cesário’s work, called Lembrança de Petrolina (2022). In this piece of literary work, the author elaborates a versified narrative (cordel) following the orality ways in which the lyric voice passes throughout diverse elements which conform the popular cultural images of the city, highlighting the religious elements, the monuments, and the historical representative figures of the city. To the writing we chose a bibliographic and qualitative research and we took the presumptions of the Literature Theory and History as our basis, among others. As a result of our study, we can highlight the great importance of the literary works which basis in Brazil are the popular oral constructions.