Books of reading and the construction of national identity of children italians and descendants by reading (São Paulo early XX century).

Abstract

From the last quarter of the nineteenth century the foreign immigrant began to play an increasingly important role in the history of São Paulo. The text aims to investigate printed civility prescriptions and reading books that have been successful in Italian ethnic schools and primary schools in São Paulo attended by immigrants and / or their children between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the theoretical-methodological perspective of cultural history, the ‘Graduate series of Puiggari-Barret’ o and the reading book Piccolo mondo are taken as a privileged source. Based on the conceptual corpus constituted by Norbert Elias, the procedures, instruments, sources and directions of analysis were defined, based on the interest in examining practices and modeling processes of the subjects who lived the social time of childhood for which constitute as mental or psychic configurations, and in which cognition, feeling, attitude, behavior, value, are not subject to abstraction. The authors expressed in their books a civilizing project, in which the formation of the citizen, the love of the homeland, the recognition and valorization of heroes, values, language, historical events, monuments and landscapes gained prominence. The authors claimed in their reading books, produced on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean the marks of a national identity aimed.