Abstract: Based on the Brazil travel accounts of Jean de Léry (Viagem à terra do Brasil/Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, 1578), André João Antonil (Cultura e opulência do Brasil por suas drogas e minas, 1711) and Richard Francis Burton (Viagem aos planaltos do Brasil/Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil, 1869) and using Michel Foucault’s perspective, the article follows a historical-cultural approach, in the chronological order of the accounts, in order to highlight stasis and change in the perception and description of the Brazilian nature’s diversity. This approach permits the article to characterize differentiated perceptions of the world and forms of the narrators’ connectedness with time, environment, and surrounding objects, in a setting of significant contrasts and subtle nuances. The travellers’ multidimensional perceptual experience of land and nature appears channelled in a variety of directions, with differences of size, measure and volume permitting the assertion of multiple meanings throughout each text. The interpenetration between thought, ordering and classification makes it possible to discern three distinctive orientations within the texts, schematized within a three-fold texture of height-width-depth.

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