This dissertation focuses on the historical formation of the work of João Guimarães Rosa. With the emphasis on his debut book, Sagarana, from 1946, this text works with the following hypothesis: beyond technical and literary experimentation, present throughout Rosas body of work, there is in Sagarana a commitment to a historical object, the sertão. This dissertation accompanies the characterization of the object, born from the social tensions of the Brazilian First Republic. By following this object in Rosas work, we assume his insertion in the post-1930s tradition, in which the autonomy of the object-sertão comes to the forefront of literary representation. We thus arrive at our second hypothesis: this autonomy and its importance to literature from 1930 to 1964 find an explanation in the very dynamics that propelled the country towards industrialization. The new needs that arose with the emerging process of industrialization highlight the fate of poor populations of the sertão, on which they depend without reservations. The third hypothesis presenting itself in this work is therefore that the serious commitment to the object-sertão offers a challenge to the formation theories brought about the same period: the rosian form, as much as the social theories concerned with the formation of the country, would have benefited themselves from the same momentum granted by the integrative efforts of the industry. But the object-sertão would pose as an other to these theories utopian projections, which impregnated these dynamics with the hope that the industrial processes would bring about an effective sense of citizenship to the country. This dissertation demonstrates how Rosas attention to this very specific object the revolutions on the sertãos social matter -, when formalized, bursts through the formative utopia, thus revealing the point of impossibility of a bourgeois construction in Brazil.