This dissertation has as its object the sertão in Brazilian literature of the 19th century, in the work of the writer and literary critic Tristão de Alencar Araripe Júnior. Son of one of the traditional families of the North, cousin of the writer José de Alencar, Araripe Júnior was trained as a lawyer at the Recife Law School, standing out as a literary critic and, less successfully, as a writer of novels. In Ceará, he took an active part in intellectual debate alongside Capistrano de Abreu and Raimundo Antônio da Rocha Lima, in meetings at the French Academy and later at the Escola Popular. In Rio de Janeiro, alongside Sílvio Romero and José Veríssimo, he formed the critical trinity of the naturalist period in Brazil. He was a member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, a member of the Instituto Histórico do Ceará and the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, and of the Sociedade de Geografia do Rio de Janeiro.  Despite this, his work received limited attention in academic works, outside the literary area, especially regarding the theme of the sertão. In this sense, we seek, on the basis of two texts by the writer, O Retirante: scenas da seca de 1845 (1877) and O Reino Encantado: crônica sebastianista (1878) to understand how the author constructs in his writing an idea of the sertão. In his vast critical production, Araripe Jr. created the concept of brazilian obnubilation, a term used by the author to explain the process of adaptation of the European man to the Brazilian tropical environment and the formation of brazilianness. Our aim is to understand the ways in which the northern sertão was produced in the Brazilian literary discourse of the 19th century and in the writings of Araripe Júnior. Trying to understand the discursive practices about the backlands in the production of Araripe Júnior goes through the search of power and knowledge relations that produced these images and these enunciates, which invented the northern backlands. To this end, we establish a theoretical dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault to address the relationship of the discursive practices of the author with the production of a given vision of the sertão of the North in the Brazilian eighteenth-century literature.