ABSTRACT
Adolfo Caminha's Bom-Crioulo is the first Brazilian naturalist novel to be totally conceived and written after the inauguration of the Republic, but the text looks back in history. The technique of providing a historical background in which Amaro's story is embedded, besides situating him as a runaway slave, serves the purpose of providing the story with a perspective which functions in the text as both background and foreground for the development of the plot, and which operates on several levels within the narrative. Bom-Crioulo has traditionally been seen as a love story. In general, critics of the end of the nineteenth century ignored the publication of Bom-Crioulo. According to Lucia Miguel Pereira, even the always alert critic Jose Veríssimo never mentioned its existence, and Romero only mentioned it briefly. Because Araripe Junior's is one of the first examples of Bom-Crioulo's initial reception, it invites some further analysis.
