ABSTRACT
The first work of Brazilian literature to include the sport as a significant feature, Henrique Maximiano Coelho Neto's 1908 novel Esphinge, centres on the residents of Miss Barkley's boarding house in Rio de Janeiro's Paysandu district. In a twist on the conventional presentation of these traditional poles of thought in Latin American intellectual circles, it is the modern and urban European practice that is barbarous in its assault on a good Brazilian family man. Campaigning against football was at the heart of Lima Barreto's journalistic essays and articles from 1919 onwards, but he also included it as the feature that drove the plot in several of his short stories. In the first period of Brazilian football literature, which might be seen to cover the period between 1914 and 1922, several of the country's most influential authors saw in football a foreign and decidedly un-Brazilian practice to which they were vehemently opposed.
