With the stroke of the pen - From the soap opera to the chronicle, a crossed history of the press between France and Brazil (1830-1930) from journeys of its journalists and authors

The French press of the 19th century is characterized by a combination of journalism and literature that gave rise to various genres and news sections - from the weekly-magazine type journalism to serialized fiction, from interviews to travel reportage and serialized news stories. All this action was happening in the bottom part of newspaper pages, which had been turned into experimental laboratories for the literati who lent their quills to those periodicals.

Those same characteristics can be found in Brazilian newspapers of the time. Indeed, innovations in French periodicals were almost simultaneously adopted by Brazilian newspapers, which in turn would adjust, adapt, transform and reinvent them.

This research will focus on the life and work of two pairs of French and Brazilian writers and journalists in order to investigate how those relationships and flows of cultural transfers were established between the two countries. Eugène Sue (1804-1857) and José de Alencar (1829-1877), Jules Huret (1863-1914) and João do Rio (1881-1921) were responsible for innovations in the press of their times and, even if unaware, also played the role of cultural mediators in processes of assimilation and borrowing, between inspiration and creation. Taking the narrative of their crossed biographies as a starting point, this work also seeks to understand the development of a specific genre, the chronicle (crônica in Portuguese), a tributary to this 19th century hybrid form of journalism and literature which is present in the main Brazilian newspapers to date.