Portuguese literature

Introduction

      the body of writing in the Portuguese language produced by the peoples of Portugal, which includes the Madeira Islands and the Azores.

      The literature of Portugal is distinguished by a wealth and variety of lyric poetry, which has characterized it from the beginning of its language, after the Roman occupation; by its wealth of historical writing documenting Portugal's rulers, conquests, and expansion; by the moral and allegorical Renaissance drama of Gil Vicente (Vicente, Gil); by Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads), the 16th-century national epic of Luís de Camões (Camões, Luís de); by the 19th-century realist novels of José Maria de Eça de Queirós (Eça de Queirós, José Maria de); by Fernando Pessoa (Pessoa, Fernando)'s poetry and prose of the 20th century; by a substantial number of women writers; and by a resurgence in poetry and the novel in the 1970s, which culminated in José Saramago (Saramago, José)'s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

      Portuguese literature, which until the 19th century lay largely unstudied and unknown outside of Portugal, has a distinct individuality and is an expression of a clearly defined national temperament and language. Yet from its beginning it has been exposed to many different linguistic and national influences. The first book published in Portugal was in Hebrew; the influence on the medieval Portuguese lyric of the Mozarabic kharjah and the muwashshaḥ, written in both Arabic and Hebrew, is still a matter of dispute. Provençal practices dominated troubadours (troubadour)' performances. Castilian literature provided models for court poetry and theatre until Francisco de Sá de Miranda (Sá de Miranda, Francisco de) brought Renaissance forms from Italy in 1526. The closeness of Portugal's contacts with Spain, reinforced by dynastic marriages that often gave the court at Lisbon a predominantly Spanish atmosphere, explains why for two centuries and more after 1450 nearly every Portuguese writer of note spoke and wrote both Portuguese and Castilian. Some Portuguese writers' works, such as those by Vicente, Jorge de Montemayor (Montemayor, Jorge de), and Francisco Manuel de Melo (Melo, Francisco Manuel de), are numbered among the classics of Spanish letters. French literary and aesthetic standards dominated the 18th century and continued into the 19th, when the Romantic movement brought to Portugal English and, to a lesser degree, German influence that persisted for more than a century. After his death Pessoa was discovered and enthroned as the quintessential figure of European Modernist literature; his writings, in both English and Portuguese, as well as those of Saramago, reaffirmed the internationalism of Portuguese literature in the 20th century.

      This article focuses on Portuguese literature produced within the boundaries of modern-day Portugal. Portuguese is also the language of Brazil and five African countries—Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The literatures of these countries are treated separately under Brazilian literature and African literature.

Writings of the early period

Poetry

      Although no literary documents belonging to the 12th century (the first century of Portugal's history as a nation) have survived, there is evidence of the existence of an indigenous popular oral poetry in sung verse during the preceding centuries. A composition attributed to Alfonso X, a 13th-century king of Castile and Leon, is the earliest extant parallelistic song—a brief, repetitive lyrical poem marked by a wistful sadness that runs throughout Portuguese literature. Of the many later poems that survive, most belong to the major categories of cantigas de amor (“songs of love”; a male voice singing of problems of love), cantigas de amigo (“songs of the lover”; a male poet singing in a female voice to express a wide range of predicaments of love), and cantigas de escárnio e maldizer (“songs of mockery and vilification”). This body of lyrics shows the vitality of a school of poetry in Galician-Portuguese, an early dialect spoken in Galicia and the north of Portugal. Lyrics of this school were inspired by the sophisticated Provençal songs of the troubadours as well as anchored in the oral verse forms of popular tradition. This poetry reached its peak of creativity about 1240–80 under the patronage and with the direct participation of Alfonso X, although his father had begun to receive musicians and performers (trovadores and jograis) before this period. Under Alfonso X, the centre of this literary activity shifted from Galicia and the north of Portugal to Toledo (now in Spain), where it remained until his death. He was also the composer of the great majority of its texts.

      In Portugal this poetic movement coincided with the reign (1248–79) of Afonso III. Dinis, his son, had a deep interest in literature and was considered the best poet of his age in the Iberian Peninsula. As king, Dinis founded in 1290 his country's first university, at Lisbon. He encouraged translation into Portuguese of outstanding works from Castilian, Latin, and Arabic, and the musicians in his court enjoyed the most highly cultivated practice of this national poetics. In all, about 2,000 poems by some 200 poets of this period were preserved in three great cancioneiros (cancioneiro) (“songbooks”): the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, the Cancioneiro da Vaticana, and the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti (now known as the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional). The first contains compositions that predate the death of Alfonso X in 1284; it was probably compiled in the late 13th century. The latter two cancioneiros include material from the 13th and 14th centuries; they are 14th-century copies that were made in Italy, probably from a 14th-century original. Modern editions resulted from the work of the 19th-century philologists and medievalists Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos, J.J. Nunes, and Teófilo Braga (Braga, Teófilo).

      Where Portuguese courtly verse was traditionally concerned with love, religion, and the sea, the ballads known collectively as the romanceiro mixed those themes with adventure, war, and chivalry. Few of these ballads can be dated earlier than the 15th century; they belong to a tradition of anonymous poetry kept alive by oral transmission, by which they were spread across Europe and North Africa after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century. The romanceiro experienced a late artificial flowering from known poets in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Prose

      Religious writings, brief annals of the early kings, moral tales, and books of descent formed the earliest Portuguese prose texts. The 14th-century Livro de linhagens (“Book of Genealogy”) of Pedro Afonso, count of Barcelos, constituted a landmark by going beyond genealogy to history and legend. The work contains short epic narratives, romances, and tales of adventure and fantasy. He was also responsible for the compilation in 1344 of the Crónica geral de Espanha (“General Chronicle of Spain”), of interest, within the peninsular tradition of the chronicle genre, for its original versions of well-known legends, such as that of Afonso Henriques, who (as Afonso I) was the first king of Portugal. Portuguese prose narrative also developed in the chivalric romance, for which Amadís de Gaula (14th century; Amadís of Gaul)—thought to have been written originally in Portuguese or Castilian—was a prototype.

      The early popularity of subject matter based on Celtic tradition is attested in the five songs based on Breton lays (Breton lay) with which the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional opens. The ideals of chivalry and the spirit of sentimental adventure associated with the knights of the Round Table strongly appealed to the Portuguese imagination: História dos Cavaleiros da Távola Redonda (“History of the Knights of the Round Table”) and the Demanda do Santo Graal (“Search for the Holy Grail”), adapted from the French, are the chief relics of the considerable writing in this genre.

The 15th and 16th centuries

Historical chronicles and poetry

      After the marriage in 1387 of King John (João) I (John I), founder of the new dynasty of Aviz, and his English queen, Philippa, the Portuguese court became once again a literary centre. The king himself wrote a treatise on hunting. His son Edward (Duarte) collected a rich library of the ancients and of medieval poems and histories and composed a moral treatise, Leal conselheiro (1437/38; “Loyal Counselor”), which revealed a conscious stylist. But the historical chronicle distinguished the age, with credit to Edward, who in 1434, as king, created the office of cronista mor do reino, or “chief chronicler of the realm,” to which he appointed Fernão Lopes (Lopes, Fernão). Attributed to Lopes are the Crónicas de 5 reis de Portugal (“Chronicles of Five Kings of Portugal”) and the Crónica dos sete primeiros reis de Portugal (“Chronicle of the First Seven Kings of Portugal”); he wrote the texts that are today grouped under these titles sometime between his appointment and his death (c. 1460), but they were not rediscovered and published until the 20th century. Before they were found, only the chronicles of Pedro I, Fernando I, and John I were known. By combining vividness of style with serious documentation, Lopes showed himself to be the finest writer of medieval Portuguese prose and one of Europe's first modern historians.

      His successor in office, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, continued the chronicle on a lower level of artistry. His chief works are the Crónica da tomada de Ceuta (completed 1450; “Chronicle of the Conquest of Ceuta”; translated into English in part as Conquests & Discoveries of Henry the Navigator) and the Crónica do descobrimento e da conquista de Guinê (completed 1453; The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea).

      Poetry was cultivated in the mid-15th century, but the dominant influence came now from Castile, after the disappearance of the popular poetry of the troubadours. Pedro the Constable (the son of Pedro, 1st duke of Coimbra (Coimbra, Pedro, 1o duque de)) initiated the fashion of writing in Castilian. As one of the first to adopt the new Castilian trend toward allegory and the cult of Classical antiquity derived from Italy, his influence on his compatriots was doubly important. His own poems were inspired by deep feeling and much reflection on life, and he was one of almost 200 poets represented in an anthology of poetry, the Cancioneiro geral (1516; “General Songbook”) compiled by the chronicler Garcia de Resende (Resende, Garcia de), which included nearly 1,000 poems in Portuguese and Castilian from the preceding three-quarters of a century. Love was among the main subjects of these often satirical and epigrammatic poems.

Gil Vicente (Vicente, Gil) and the drama

      The emergence of the modern Portuguese play may be traced in the works of the court dramatist Gil Vicente (Vicente, Gil). The author of comedies, tragicomedies, farces, allegories, and religious plays, he wrote mostly in Portuguese and also in Castilian, even using multiple languages in his plays, which were typically presented in a Lisbon court overseen by a Castilian queen. The Barcas (1517–19; Eng. trans. The Boat Plays)—a group of autos, or religious plays (see auto sacramental)—revealed his dramatic power, his fondness for comic relief, and his deft use of popular figures and language. The phenomenon of a potential national theatre, however, died with its founder and did not find a successor; Vicente's real influence was felt instead in Spain. The inquisition, introduced into Portugal in 1536, early declared war on the popular theatre on the charge of gross humour.

The Renaissance in Portugal

 Portugal had maintained close cultural relations with Italy through the 15th century, and it was directly through Italy—and indirectly through Spain—that the Renaissance reached Portugal. In the 16th century many famous humanists took up residence in Portugal. In 1532 the historian and humanist João de Barros (Barros, João de) published the Rópica pnefma (“Spiritual Merchandise”), the most important philosophical dialogue of the time in Portugal.

      In 1547 King John (João) III (John III) reformed the University of Coimbra, and distinguished Portuguese teachers returned from abroad to assist the king in this task. At home Portugal produced scholars of note, including André de Resende, author of De antiquitatibus Lusitaniae (1593; “Of the Antiquities of Portugal”), and the painter and architect Francisco de Hollanda, who in 1548 wrote Diálogos da pintura antiga (“Dialogues on Ancient Painting”; Eng. trans. Four Dialogues on Painting).

The Italianate school of poetry and drama

      The return in 1526 of the poet Francisco de Sá de Miranda (Sá de Miranda, Francisco de) after a six-year stay in Italy initiated a literary reform of far-reaching effect. As his contemporary Garcilaso de la Vega did for Spain, Sá de Miranda introduced the new poetic forms of the sonnet, canzone, ode, and epistle to Portugal, and he gave fresh vigour to the national verse forms, mainly through his satires. His chief disciple, António Ferreira (Ferreira, António), a convinced Classicist, wrote sonnets superior in form and style.

      Other poets continued this erudite school, which triumphed with Luís de Camões (Camões, Luís de), author of the epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572; The Lusiads) and a large body of lyric poetry, which included verse in the older popular forms. In Camões a profound Classical education combined with perfect mastery of poetic technique and a lifetime of varied experience to produce in sonnets, eclogues, odes, elegies, and canções (songs) the greatest poetry of the Portuguese language. Particularly prominent in his lyric poetry, first collected and published posthumously in 1595, are Petrarchan love themes placed in the context of a Mannerist disconnect between the individual and the world and between reason and reality. Camões, who spent 17 years in Portuguese Asia and probably wrote most of The Lusiads there, based his epic on Vasco da Gama (Gama, Vasco da)'s first voyage to India. In the poem, da Gama recites the history of Portugal by way of an extensive interior discourse. (The name Lusiads is derived from Lusitania, the name of an ancient Roman province that incorporated present-day Portugal.) The poem's 10 cantos are a philosophical enactment of human, political, historical, and providential episodes, all of which question human nature, judgment, experience, and destiny. It is the Classical gods who, in the end, determine the fate of those taking part in da Gama's voyage and of their quest for the unknown.

      In the drama Sá de Miranda and his followers substituted prose for verse. Taking the ancient Roman dramatist Terence as their model, they produced not Portuguese characters but Romano-Italian types in a short-lived form of revived Classical comedy. Sá de Miranda, avowedly to combat the school of Vicente, wrote two plays set in Italy: Os estrangeiros (c. 1527; “The Foreigners”), his first prose comedy, and Os vilhalpandos (c. 1528). Ferreira, a greater dramatist, likewise attempted both tragedy based on Classical models and popular comedy derived from Roman models. O Cioso, Italian even to its characters' names, came nearer to being a comedy of character, but his fame rests chiefly on A Castro (written c. 1558; Eng. trans. The Tragedy of Ines de Castro), which treated one of the most moving tragic themes to enter European literature—the execution of Inês de Castro (Castro, Inês de), the 14th-century mistress of King Peter (Pedro) I (Peter I)—by reference to the ancient Greek dramatists Sophocles and Euripides. The theme went on to become a mainstay in European theatre through the present day. From the comic playwright Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos came another kind of comedy with Comédia Eufrosina (published 1555), written under the influence of the Spanish dialogue novel La Celestina (Celestina, La) (1499). This and his other plays, Comédia Ulissipo (published 1618) and Comédia Aulegrafia (published 1619), resembled La Celestina in form and contained a treasury of popular lore and wise and witty sayings introduced with a moral purpose.

The literature of discovery and conquest

      Discovery and conquest in Africa, Asia, and the Americas inspired historians as well as poets, who left vivid records and expressions of Portuguese voyages and empire. In the three “Decades” of his Décadas da Ásia (1552–63; “Decades of Asia”), Barros told in vigorous language the overseas deeds of his compatriots. His first “Decade” undoubtedly influenced Camões, and together, one by his prose and the other by his verse, these two authors established Portuguese as a written language, even while it was at the same time expanding as it came into contact with numerous other languages, from Swahili to Japanese, to which it also contributed vocabulary. The Decades of Asia, continued after Barros's death by the more critical and inclusive Diogo do Couto, ranks as the noblest historical monument of the 16th century.

      In Soldado prático (written before 1578, published in 1790; “Experienced Soldier”) Couto, who lived most of his life in the Indian city of Goa, added acute observations on the causes of Portuguese decadence in the East. Ten years of investigation in India underlay the História do descobrimento e conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses (1551–61; “History of the Discovery and Conquest of India by the Portuguese”) of the chronicler and notary Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, a work that ranks close to those of Barros and Couto.

 From this spate of writing on expansion overseas, attention returned, by way of chronicles of the monarchs who presided over the creation of Portugal's empire, to the history of Portugal itself. Damião de Góis (Góis, Damião de), diplomat, humanist, and intimate friend of the scholar Desiderius Erasmus (Erasmus, Desiderius), possessed an encyclopaedic mind and was one of the most critical spirits of the age. His Chronica do felicíssimo rei Dom Emanuel (1566–67; “Chronicle of the Most Happy King Dom Emanuel”) was most valuable where the author's own experience came into play.

      Travel accounts abounded, and their authors were often the first Europeans to visit the lands they described. Among the more noteworthy was História da vida do padre Francisco Xavier (1600; “History of the Life of Father Francis Xavier”) by João de Lucena. Important both as history and as human documents were the cartas (“letters”) written by Jesuits in India, China, and Japan. The anonymous Descobrimento da Florida (1577; “Discovery of Florida”) and Gabriel Soares de Sousa's Tratado descritivo do Brasil em 1587 (1587; “Descriptive Treatise on Brazil in 1587”) were reminders that Portugal was also present and active in the New World. The most celebrated, translated, and republished travel adventure–cum–novel of the age is the Peregrinação (1614; “Peregrination”; Eng. trans. The Travels of Mendes Pinto), often criticized for its exoticism and suspected exaggeration, which the adventurer Fernão Mendes Pinto (Pinto, Fernão Mendes) composed after returning to Portugal from a lifetime spent in Asia. Although published in 1735–36, História trágico-marítima (Eng. trans. in part as The Tragic History of the Sea) vividly relates the experience of travel during the preceding centuries; it is a compilation of published narratives—stories told by survivors or based on their accounts—that describe some of the notable disasters that befell Portuguese ships in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

The novel and other prose

      The poet Bernardim Ribeiro (Ribeiro, Bernardim), whose five eclogues (eclogue) introduced pastoral poetry to Portugal, was equally an innovator in prose with his pastoral novel Hystoria de menina e moça (1554; “Story of My Childhood and Adolescence”), a tale of rustic love and melancholy with chivalric elements. It adopted themes and emotions previously found only in poetry. From it Jorge deMontemayor (Montemayor, Jorge de), a musician and poet, drew some part of his inspiration for Los siete libros de la Diana (c. 1559; “The Seven Books of the Diana”; Eng. trans. The Diana), which started a fashion subscribed to by the Spanish writers Miguel de Cervantes (Cervantes, Miguel de) and Lope de Vega (Vega, Lope de), among others, and represented one of the outstanding Portuguese contributions to the development of the novel as a genre. Barros's chivalric novel Crónica do imperador Clarimundo (1520; “Chronicle of the Emperor Clarimundo”) recounts the adventures of a fictitious progenitor of the king of Portugal.

      Among Portuguese moralists and theologians writing during the 16th century are several masterly prose stylists: Samuel Usque with his Consolaçam às tribulaçõens de Israel (1553; “Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel”), a pastoral dialogue on the sufferings of the Jewish people; Heitor Pinto with his Imagem da vida Cristã (part I 1563, part II 1572; “Image of the Christian Life”); Amador Arrais with his 10 Diálogos (1589; “Dialogues”) on religious and other topics; and Tomé de Jesus with his mystic and devotional treatise Trabalhos de Jesus (1602–09; “Deeds of Jesus”). The work of scientists included that of a cosmographer and mathematician, Pedro Nunes (Nunes, Pedro), and of a botanist, Garcia da Orta, whose Colóquios dos simples e drogas (1563; Colloquies on the Simples & Drugs of India) was the first Portuguese book to be printed in the East (at Goa). Of major linguistic importance were the many grammars, lexicons, and dictionaries published in Asia, including a Portuguese-Latin-Japanese glossary published in Nagasaki in 1604. An Indo-Portuguese dialect functioned as a lingua franca throughout Asia from the 16th century. It was first documented and studied by traveling linguists in the late 19th century.

The 17th century and the Baroque

      From a literary and political point of view, the 17th century found Portugal in a state of decadence. Before Portugal lost its independence to Spain in 1580, Spanish influence had introduced the Inquisition and, with it, the censorship and suppression of books. In the 1550s the Jesuits (Jesuit) had also gained control of higher education. A preoccupation with Classical Latin was already apparent, in the work of Camões and others, before the example of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora y Argote (Góngora y Argote, Luis de) was felt; but with the exhaustion of the national spirit that underlay Portugal's political eclipse at the end of the 16th century, the influence of Góngora penetrated deeply. Its extent may be seen in the five volumes of Fénix renascida (1716–28; “Phoenix Reborn”), which anthologizes the poetry of the preceding century and shows the pervasiveness of Gongorism (gongorismo; see also culteranismo) in Portuguese poetry. This taste for the construction of literary enigmas, puzzles, labyrinths, and visual designs, all presented in an esoteric, Latinate style, led to cabalistic and occult exercises. Satire was used by those who wished to attack the dominant formalist style; the anonymous Arte de furtar (1652; “Art of Stealing”) unmasks social deviance in the time of John (João) IV (John IV), who was restored as king of a newly independent Portugal in 1640. Yet Spanish influence continued after Portugal regained its independence: use of Spanish was common, and the Portuguese court preferred Italian opera, French plays, and Spanish operettas, to the detriment of local drama and acting. The discovery of gold and diamonds in Brazil at Minas Gerais underwrote and prolonged the wealth of Baroque art in Portugal.

      The foremost literary figure of the age was Francisco Manuel de Melo (Melo, Francisco Manuel de), whose works became classics of both Spanish and Portuguese literature. With Epanáforas de vária história portuguesa (1660; “Anaphoras of Diverse Portuguese History”), a series of historical episodes, and Apólogos dialogais (published posthumously in 1721), a collection of dialogues on literary and social topics, he strove to free himself from subservience to Spanish form and style. He was more successful in doing so in prose than in verse. Most lyricists of the period remained steeped in Gongorism. Epic poets continued to be active, but few of their productions were more than rhymed chronicles.

      António Vieira (Vieira, António)—a Jesuit missionary and a diplomat who spent much of his life in Brazil and who was also preacher to the royal family in Lisbon and confessor to Queen Christina of Sweden in Rome—is known for his defense of indigenous peoples and slaves in Brazil and for the polished rhetorical flourishes and philosophical conceits in his volumes of Sermões (1679–1748; “Sermons”) and Cartas (1735–46; “Letters”). His impact on the written Portuguese language was second only to Camões. Luís de Sousa (Sousa, Luís de), a monastic chronicler, won fame as a stylist with Vida do arcebispo D. Frei Bartolomeu dos Mártires (1619; “Life of Archbishop D[ominican] Friar Bartolomeu dos Mártires”) and História de São Domingos (three parts, 1623, 1662, 1678; “History of St. Domingos”). His place in literary history was enhanced in the 19th century by Portuguese writer João Baptista de Almeida Garrett (Garrett, João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida, Visconde De Almeida Garrett), who based a play on Sousa's life.

      The struggle for the social and intellectual emancipation of women appears in late Baroque literature produced in Portuguese convents, where some nuns rejected the restrictions placed on them. Violante do Céu produced an intellectualized poetry of concepts far beyond the norm of feminine sentimentality, while Maria do Céu wrote poetry in Castilian and Portuguese that expressed religious themes with a lyrical eroticism. In 1669 the publication in France of Lettres portugaises (“Portuguese Letters”; Eng. trans. The Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun) introduced a literary mystery that would enchant readers for centuries. These five short letters, purportedly translated into French from lost originals, were presented as love letters; they were later attributed to Mariana Alcoforado (Alcoforado, Mariana), a Portuguese nun who was abandoned at a convent in Beja by her lover, Noel Bouton de Chamilly, a French army officer stationed in Portugal in the 1660s. Although the letters are now thought to be the work of their supposed translator—the French lawyer and diplomat Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne, vicomte de Guilleragues (Guilleragues, Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne, viscount of)—and have been subsumed into French literature, they continue to be admired for their unsurpassable psychoanalysis of passion as well as for their perceived Peninsular consciousness. The Portuguese poet and statesman Teófilo Braga (Braga, Teófilo) considered them the most beautiful works of the 17th century, and they were widely translated by European poets of note into the 20th century (including Rainer Maria Rilke (Rilke, Rainer Maria) in 1913). Scholars still debate the question of their authenticity and authorship, while poets, playwrights, and novelists dramatize their intense words of faith, doubt, and despair. The Portuguese nun of these letters is a literary paradigm as significant in European literature as that of Inês de Castro.

The 18th century

      Literary culture of the 18th century in Portugal, as in Spain, showed the influence of French classicism and of the Enlightenment; the ideas of the latter would be mobilized as a challenge to the aristocracy. Barbadiño (pseudonym of the theologian and philosopher Luís António Verney) poured scorn on prevailing methods of education in Veradeiro método de estudar (1746; “True Method of Studying”). Matias Aires, who studied science in Spain and France, returned to Portugal to write Reflexões sobre a vaidade (1752; “Reflections on Vanity”), a philosophical and moral critique expressing his skeptical conclusions about human nature. Men of liberal ideas traveled to France and England; with their subsequent writings they set an example that gave rise to Enlightenment-inspired reforms, particularly in education and science, that invaded every other branch of letters. Among the most influential were Alexandre de Gusmão, Francisco Xavier de Oliveira, António Ribeiro Sanches, José Correia da Serra, Avelar Brotero, and Francisco Manuel do Nascimento (Nascimento, Francisco Manuel do). New literary societies called arcádias (arcádia), which aimed to revive poetry by urging a return to Classicism, cooperated in the task of reform. In 1720 King John (João) V (John V) established the Royal Academy of Portuguese History, which counted among its members such men as António Caetano de Sousa, author of the colossal História genealógica da casa real portuguesa (1735–49; “Genealogical History of the Portuguese Royal House”). The Royal Academy of Sciences, founded in 1779, initiated research into the study of Portuguese literary history. In its ranks were found nearly all the scholars of note at the end of the century, such as the ecclesiastical historian Manuel do Cenáculo; António Ribeiro dos Santos, a scientist; João Pedro Ribeiro, a historian; and the critics Francisco Alexandre Lobo and Fortunato de São Boaventura.

      In 1756 António Dinis da Cruz e Silva established the Arcádia Lusitana (also called the Arcádia Ulissiponense), its first aim being the uprooting of Spanish influence. The bucolic verse of Domingos dos Reis Quita signified a return to the native Portuguese tradition of two centuries earlier. Sincerity and suffering spoke in the poetry of Tomás António Gonzaga (Gonzaga, Tomás Antônio), who was born and educated in Portugal and was in 1782 named a judge in Brazil, where he wrote his Marília de Dirceu (1792, expanded in 1799; “Marília of Dirceu”), consisting of love lyrics in a pastoral setting. In 1790 the Nova Arcádia came into being, its two most distinguished members being the rival poets Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage (Bocage, Manuel Maria Barbosa du), a precursor of the Romantic spirit, and José Agostinho de Macedo (Macedo, José Agostinho de), a satirist.

      Outside the arcádias stood the dissidentes, among whom were at least two writers of distinction: the satirist Nicolau Tolentino de Almeida (Tolentino de Almeida, Nicolau), who painted the customs and follies of his day with devastating accuracy, and Francisco Manuel do Nascimento (Nascimento, Francisco Manuel do) (pseudonym Filinto Elísio), who addressed himself perseveringly to purifying the language and to restoring the cult of the 16th-century poets.

      Early in the 18th century, popular authors attempted a revival of the drama in Lisbon. The Óperas portuguesas (published 1733–41; “Portuguese Operas”), written by António José da Silva (Silva, Antônio José da) for puppet theatre, owe their name to the arias, minuets, and modinhas (modinha) (light popular songs) interspersed among the prose dialogue of these works. Known as “O Judeu” (“The Jew”), Silva had been forcibly converted to Christianity in his 20s; his satirical themes attracted the condemnation of the inquisition, and he was executed in an auto-da-fé (“act of faith”) in Lisbon in 1739.

The 19th century

Poetry

      With the arrival of Romanticism in Portugal, the 19th century witnessed a general renewal of Portuguese letters. In poetry and drama João Baptista de Almeida Garrett (Garrett, João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida, Visconde De Almeida Garrett), by reviving medieval and national historical themes, became the country's chief exponent of the movement. He read literature in English and French and introduced Portugal to nationalistic Romanticism through two epics, Camões (1825) and Dona Branca (1826). Garrett, who spent most of the 1820s in England because of his outspoken opposition to Portugal's government, envisioned his exile and persecution in both works, whether through Camões's separation from his country or through Dona Branca's being kidnapped by the last Moorish king of Silves.

 António Feliciano de Castilho (Castilho, António Feliciano de), mixing Classicism with Romanticism, exercised much influence over a younger generation of poets, including João de Lemos, Soares de Passos, and Tomás Ribeiro (author of the ardently patriotic D. Jaime, 1862). In 1865 Antero Tarquínio de Quental (Quental, Antero Tarquínio de), a student of German philosophy and poetry, and Teófilo Braga (Braga, Teófilo), a disciple of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (Comte, Auguste), led a revolt against the primacy of Castilho. The Campo de flores (1893; “Field of Flowers”) of João de Deus (Deus, João de) contained some of the finest short poems in the language, marked by a spontaneous simplicity. Abílio Manuel Guerra Junqueiro (Junqueiro, Abílio Manuel Guerra), whose work showed him to be an heir to the French poet Victor Hugo (Hugo, Victor), was a would-be social revolutionary prone to grandiloquence. In Os simples (1892) he turned to the portrayal of peasant life, and this work constituted his finest poetry. Akin to him was António Duarte Gomes Leal, author of Claridades do sul (1875; “Clarities of the South”) and O Anti-Cristo (1884; “The Anti-Christ”), who could likewise achieve quiet sincerity when dealing with humble themes.

      Cesário Verde (Verde, Cesário), considered by some to be the greatest poet of the 19th century, addressed himself to the poetic essence of common realities; "Sentimento de um occidental" (“Feelings of a Westerner”) is a poem saturated in irony and alienation that depicts a prototype of the flaneur figure (an urban wanderer) that would later be developed in literary Modernism. António Nobre (Nobre, António)'s Só (1892; “Alone”) is intensely Portuguese in its themes, mood, and rhythms; he and Teixeira de Pascoais developed a cult of saudade (“yearning,” or “nostalgia”)—a movement that came to be known as saudosismo (saudade)—that dominated the aesthetic of the time. The French Symbolist movement found an enthusiastic adept in Eugénio de Castro (Castro, Eugénio de), and António Candido Gonçalves Crespo stood out as the first of his country's Parnassians (Parnassian). Camilo Pessanha (Pessanha, Camilo)—who lived and wrote in the Portuguese colony of Macau, in China—bridged the 19th and 20th centuries: he carried Symbolist verse to a point at which its musicality and images became fragmented and dispersed. Collected in Clepsidra (1920; “Water Clock”), Pessanha's poetry had previously attracted the attention of Fernando Pessoa (Pessoa, Fernando), with whom he corresponded, and the poets of the avant-garde review Orpheu (founded 1915). A fin de siècle current of exoticism and Orientalism is present in the works of Wenceslau de Moraes, a Portuguese counterpart to the French novelist Pierre Loti (Loti, Pierre). Moraes was a diplomat who spent the final 30 years of his life in Japan, where he adopted the culture, converted to Buddhism, and, beginning in the 1890s, published a series of books describing Japanese culture to the West.

Drama and the novel

      Garrett, seeking to reinvigorate drama, found he had to create anew the plays, actors, and audience of Portuguese theatre despite its revival during the 18th century. With Um auto de Gil Vicente (1838; “An Auto by Gil Vicente”), O alfageme de Santarém (1841; “The Swordsmith of Santarém”), and especially Frei Luís de Sousa (1843; Brother Luiz de Sousa), he produced a national theatre on historical themes. João da Camara inherited the theatre that Garrett created and became Portugal's outstanding dramatist at the end of the 19th century with such works as Afonso VI (1890), Rosa enjeitada (1901; “Rose Abandoned”), and Os velhos (1893; “The Old Ones”).

      As Garrett was in poetry and drama, Alexandre Herculano (Herculano, Alexandre) was Portugal's chief exponent of Romanticism in prose. Herculano returned from exile in England and France—the result of his involvement in an army revolt in 1831 and his political liberalism—with an enthusiasm for the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott (Scott, Sir Walter, 1st Baronet) that prompted him to launch the historical romance in Portugal with such novels as Eurico, o presbítero (1844; “Eurico, the Presbyter”) and Lendas e narrativas (1851; “Legends and Narratives”). Garrett himself also attempted to modernize the Portuguese novel; in Viagens na minha terra (1846; Travels in My Homeland) he used the models provided by Irish-born English novelist Laurence Sterne (Sterne, Laurence) and French author Xavier de Maistre. Many, however, preferred to follow the lead of Herculano, including Oliveira Marreca, Arnaldo Gama, and Pinheiro Chagas. Popular successes among historical novels were A mocidade de D. João V (1852; “The Youth of D. João V”) by Luís António Rebelo da Silva and Um ano na côrte (1850–51; “A Year in the Court”) by João de Andrade Corvo.

 The 19th century was the great age of the novel, and among the most prominent novelists of the era were Camilo Castelo Branco (Castelo Branco, Camilo), Júlio Dinis (Dinis, Júlio) (pseudonym of Joaquim Guilherme Gomes Coelho), and especially José Maria de Eça de Queirós (Eça de Queirós, José Maria de), one of the greatest authors of the European realist novel. Castelo Branco was a master of language and of dramatic, or melodramatic, plot, while Dinis depicted country life, as in As pupilas do Senhor Reitor (1867; “The Pupils of the Dean”). Eça de Queirós, who wrote his portraits of strata of Portuguese society chiefly while living in England and France, treated figures of national life with realist irony and as part of a sweeping panorama. His masterpiece is Os Maias (1888; The Maias), a portrait of three generations of a Portuguese family.

Studies in history and literature

      With his magnum opus, the História de Portugal (1846–53; “History of Portugal”), and with the História da origem e estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal (1854–59; “History of the Origin and Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal”), Herculano established himself as a leader of the Portuguese historians of his day, among whom are Simão José da Luz Soriano (on constitutionalism), Luís António Rebelo da Silva (on the period of Spanish rule under the Philips), and José Maria Latino Coelho (on the dictatorship of Sebastião de Carvalho, marquis of Pombal (Pombal, Sebastião de Carvalho, marquês de)). Henrique da Gama Barros and António de Sousa Silva Costa Lobo followed Herculano on early historical and political topics. The works of Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins demonstrated psychological imagination, a notable capacity for general ideas, and a gift of picturesque narration. He left in his numerous writings a vast portrait gallery of the great figures of his country, particularly in the Portugal contemporaneo (1881; “Contemporary Portugal”).

      Literary study flourished in the second half of the century, in the studies of medieval literature by Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcellos, in Braga's history of Portuguese literature (1869–72), and in the philological studies of Adolfo Coelho, Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado, and José Leite de Vasconcellos.

The 20th century

From monarchy to republic

      The passage from monarchy to republic in Portugal in 1910 saw a revisionary urge in literature associated chiefly with the city of Porto and the movement known as the Renascença Portuguesa (“Portuguese Renaissance”). Leonardo Coimbra was its philosopher, and António Sérgio its critic and historian. Its poets—Mário Beirão, Augusto Casimiro, and João de Barros—adopted the saudosismo (saudade) of Teixeira de Pascoais as the key to the nation's recovery of greatness, although the inadequacy of this nostalgia was soon realized. One of the most enduring poets of the Aestheticism and erotic Decadentism (Decadent) that marked the literature of the turn of the century was António Botto. Led by the historian and poet António Sardinha, the Integralist school, which favoured the Roman Catholic monarchist tradition, reacted to such perceived excesses from 1914 onward. Such sentiment contributed to the eventual fall of Portugal's First Republic in 1926.

      Out of late Symbolism and saudosismo came Fernando Pessoa (Pessoa, Fernando), posthumously regarded as one of the most brilliant poets of European Modernism. His literary reputation had grown substantially by the end of the 20th century, with editions (and reeditions) of his works, extensive research into and publication of his manuscripts at the National Library in Lisbon, and thousands of scholarly articles. As “the man who never was,” in the words of the critic and poet Jorge de Sena, Pessoa is the supreme example of the fragmented poet who became “plural” and universal through his adapted heteronyms. He exerted a wide influence after publishing under several names in the short-lived journal Orpheu (founded 1915); in 1935 he furthered his influence with a letter in which he explained his poetics to the poet Adolfo Casais Monteiro, a member of the Presença (“Presence”) group of writers (its name derived from the literary magazine Presença, founded in 1927). Although in his lifetime Pessoa published only four books—three of them collections of poetry in English, the fourth, Mensagem (1934; Message), a work in Portuguese comparable to Camões's The Lusiads in its poetic national historicism—his literary archive contains more than 20,000 pages. His contribution to Portuguese drama was also significant. He adapted the concept of “static drama”—originally developed by the Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (Maeterlinck, Maurice)—in his only play, O marinheiro (written 1913; “The Mariner”), which takes place in a medieval castle, where four women, one a corpse, await the return of an absent sailor. Pessoa's play carried Symbolist drama into the experimental arena of modern theatre.

      Portuguese Futurism is inseparable from Orpheu, in which the major poetry and manifestos of Pessoa and his circle were published. Pessoa's chief collaborator on the journal was Mário de Sá-Carneiro (Sá-Carneiro, Mário de), a post-Symbolist poet with ties to saudosismo whose books of short stories Princípio (1912; “Beginning”), A confissão de Lúcio (1914; Lúcio's Confession), and Céu em fogo (1915; “Sky in Flames”; Eng. trans. The Great Shadow, and Other Stories) describe a bizarre scientific modernity. Sá-Carneiro's poetry, written in Paris, expresses the crisis of a personality inadequate to its own intense feelings; it perhaps hints at the reasons for his suicide in 1916. His Dispersão (1914; “Dispersion”) features exuberant images, an obsession with verbal constructions and metaphors, and experimentation with graphic design and fonts. The most versatile figure of Portuguese Modernism is José de Almada Negreiros, a poet, novelist, caricaturist, dancer, and actor who provoked scandal with his Manifesto anti-Dantas (1915), which ridiculed the doctor and politician Júlio Dantas, and his "Ultimatum futurista ás gerações portuguezas do Seculo XX" (1917; “Futurist Ultimatum to the Portuguese Generations of the 20th Century”). Almada Negreiros's work exudes independence and spontaneity. His poetry—the primary collection of which is A invenção do dia claro (1921; “Invention of the Clear Day”)—aims to recover a mythic ingenuousness, while A engomadeira (1917; “The Starcher”), a novel, is a precursor of Surrealist automatism and Nome de guerra (written 1925, published 1938; “Nom de Guerre,” or “Pseudonym”) is considered the first contemporary Portuguese novel. Almada Negreiros, like Amadeu de Souza-Cardoso, was also a visual artist who worked in a Modernist vein.

      Among novelists of the first half of the century, Aquilino Ribeiro (Ribeiro, Aquilino) was a prolific writer whose themes often were centred on his native region of Beira. His delight in life was combined with an awareness of decay and death. Of the Presença group, Miguel Torga (Torga, Miguel) (pseudonym of Adolfo Correia da Rocha), a poet and storyteller and the author of autobiographical works and memoirs, showed a radical individualism that took its strength from his peasant roots in northern Portugal. The psychological novel, which had attained a sophisticated form with José Régio (Régio, José) (who was also an outstanding dramatist and religious poet), took new, neorealist directions with the work of António Alves Redol and Carlos de Oliveira. The latter's Casa na duna (1943; “House on the Sand Dune”), his first novel, mixes acute perception of human motivation with social awareness, a combination that would appear throughout his career, including in his final novel, Finisterra (1978; “Land's End”). Vergílio Ferreira (Ferreira, Vergílio), in a transition to existentialism, added a metaphysical dimension to the novel of social concern with Alegria breve (1965; “Brief Joy”) and explored the evanescent moods of the past and the idea of death in Para sempre (1983; “Forever”).

      From 1939 to 1945 Vitorino Nemésio directed the literary journal Revista de Portugal (“Portuguese Review”), which broadened the horizons of Portuguese neorealism by publishing poetry that exemplified new trends and movements, including French Surrealism and English Imagism (Imagist). (Surrealism did not manifest itself in Portuguese literature until the late 1940s and '50s, in the works of Mario Cesariny de Vasconcelos, Alexandre O'Neill, Rubem A. Alves, and Manuel de Lima.) Nemésio's regional novel Mau tempo no canal (1945; “Bad Weather in the Channel”; Eng. trans. Stormy Isles: An Azorean Tale) is considered one of the best novels of the mid-20th century. Jorge de Sena was an engineer by profession who lived in exile in Brazil (1959–65) and the United States (1965–78). His work as a critic reflected his encyclopaedic mind and scientific training, and his poetry showed him to be the most important poet of midcentury, his works incorporating themes drawn from art and music while also sharply criticizing Portugal's repressive sociopolitical reality.

      Poetry was practiced intensely after midcentury, in reaction to neorealism, by a generation of diverse lyric poets that included Manuel Alegre, António Ramos Rosa, and Rui Knopfli. Eugénio de Andrade (Andrade, Eugénio de) and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen were among the most distinguished poets of the second half of the 20th century. A lively experimental poetry movement beginning in the 1960s promoted vanguardist theories and anthologies. It was led by E.M. de Melo e Castro, Ana Hatherly, Herberto Helder, and Alberto Pimenta. Hatherly created poetry that used graphic design as an element of composition. Pimenta's theatrical works are marked by extravagant cultural and linguistic transgressions and self-conscious iconoclasm.

After 1974

      After the revolution of April 1974 and the overthrow of Marcello Caetano (Caetano, Marcello José das Neves Alves), who six years earlier had assumed control of the dictatorship established by António de Oliveira Salazar (Salazar, António de Oliveira), poetry and fiction found a new freedom of expression. Writing of all kinds began to reflect a concern with the colonial past in Africa as well as with the national historical background of empire. Experimental poetry and feminist writing became European and international, while poets reaffirmed the lyrical, introspective, and abstract expression that is historically characteristic of Portugal's literature. Jorge de Sena published Sinais de fogo (1978; Signs of Fire), an impressive novel about the effects in Portugal of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). J. Cardoso Pires based Balada da praia dos cães (1982; Ballad of Dogs' Beach) on the account of a political assassination. The novels that constitute Almeida Faria's Tetralogia lusitana (“Lusitanian Tetrology”), published from 1965 to 1983, explore the internal tensions experienced by rural families caught between the end of fascism and the forces of the 1974 revolution.

      Women novelists brought a new voice to fiction. Maria Agustina Bessa Luís (Bessa Luís, Maria Agustina), a prolific writer who first came to notice after she published the novel A Sibila (1954; “The Sibyl”), continued publishing works through the turn of the 21st century. She extended the psychological insight evident in her drawing of fictional characters to enhance her portraits of historical figures, as in her novel Fanny Owen (1979). Maria Velho da Costa was one of the authors of Novas cartas portuguesas (1971; Eng. trans. The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters), a book that became a cause célèbre for feminism when its authors were charged with indecency by the government and put on trial for corrupting public morals. In Lucialima (1983; “Lemon Verbena”) she explored with great subtlety the condition of women in a repressive society. Along with Teolinda Gersão, Maria Gabriela Llansol, and others, Lídia Jorge represented a new surge of women's writing in the late 1980s; in A costa dos murmúrios (1988; The Murmuring Coast) she introduced a feminine perspective to the theme of colonial wars in Africa. António Lobo Antunes, who also took colonial wars as his subject, created novels of parody and psychological disturbance (e.g., Auto dos danados [1985; Act of the Damned]).

 José Saramago (Saramago, José), recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, came to the fore in the 1980s with novels combining acute observation of reality with flights of poetic fancy. In Memorial do convento (1982; “Memoirs of the Convent”; Eng. trans. Baltasar and Blimunda), told in the form of an epic tale, the story of the building of a magnificent convent is also an allegory of human suffering throughout history. His novel O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (1984; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis) is a masterful critique of fascism that ingeniously re-creates a character invented by Pessoa, while Ensaio sobre a cegueira (1995; “Essay on Blindness”; Eng. trans. Blindness), one of the greatest allegories in 20th-century world literature, is a chilling and macabre moral tale of iniquity and goodness.

      After 1974 there was also an outpouring of notable works in history and literary criticism, through which Portugal's literature, culture, and civilization became more adequately known. The many prominent essayists at the end of the 20th century who were anchored by their philosophical orientations included Eduardo Prado Coelho, José Augusto França, David Mourão-Ferreira, António Quadros, Agostinho da Silva, and Eduardo Lourenço.

      Portugal's role in the world was projected in numerous ways as the 20th century drew to a close. In 1998 the Lisbon World Exposition (Expo '98) was accompanied by the publication of scholarly works related to the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Vasco da Gama in Asia, an outpouring that constituted an unequaled moment of intensive historical, cultural, literary, and artistic research. As it entered the 21st century, Portuguese literature was grounded solidly on the critical analysis and lyrical exposition of its history that was being undertaken by Portugal's major novelists and poets.

William C. Atkinson Norman Jones Lamb Luís de Sousa Rebelo K. David Jackson

Additional Reading

Anthologies

Anthologies of Portuguese literature in English translation are few. They include Aubrey F.G. Bell (compiler), The Oxford Book of Portuguese Verse, 2nd ed. (1972); and A.R. Barter, Portugal Through Her Literature: An Anthology of Prose and Verse (1972).

Histories

The number of wide-ranging historical surveys of Portuguese literature available in English is small. Although now dated, Aubrey F.G. Bell, Portuguese Literature (1922; reprinted 1970), is a standard work with an extensive bibliography. Histories in English by Portuguese authors include Maria Leonor Carvalhão Buescu, History of Literature (1991; originally published in Portuguese, 1991); and Miguel Tamen and Helena C. Buescu (eds.), A Revisionary History of Portuguese Literature (1999). Hugo Kunoff (compiler), Portuguese Literature from Its Origins to 1990: A Bibliography Based on the Collections of Indiana University (1994), is the most authoritative published bibliography of the literature.

Critical studies

General critical overviews can be found in Aubrey F.G. Bell, Studies in Portuguese Literature (1914, reprinted 1975); and Edward Glaser, Portuguese Studies (1976). Biographical essays appear in Germán Bleiberg, Maureen Ihrie, and Janet Pérez (eds.), Dictionary of the Literature of the Iberian Peninsula, 2 vol. (1993); and Mônica Rector and Fred M. Clark (eds.), Portuguese Writers (2004).Frede Jensen, The Earliest Portuguese Lyrics (1978), is a study of lyric poetry. It was later superseded by the groundbreaking analysis in Rip Cohen, Thirty-two Cantigas d'amigo of Dom Dinis: Typology of a Portuguese Renunciation (1987). Early historical prose is the subject of Aubrey F.G. Bell, Fernam Lopez (1921).Studies of the Renaissance theatre include Hope Hamilton-Faria, The Farces of Gil Vicente: A Study in the Stylistics of Satire (1976); and René Pedro Garay, Gil Vicente and the Development of the Comedia (1988). Studies of Camões and The Lusiads include Leonard Bacon, “Camões and the Glory of Portugal,” in Walter Morris Hart et al., Five Gayley Lectures, 1947–1954 (1954, reprinted 1977), pp. 47–80; Henry Hersch Hart, Luis de Camoëns and the Epic of the Lusiads (1962); and James Nicolopulos, Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophets and Imitation in La araucana and Os lusíadas (2000). The literature of Portuguese expansion during the 16th and 17th centuries is the theme of R. Hooykaas, The Impact of the Voyages of Discovery on Portuguese Humanist Literature (1970). Portuguese shipwreck literature is redefined as a separate genre in Josiah Blackmore, Manifest Perdition (2002).The 17th century and the Enlightenment in Portugal is the topic of Ronald W. Sousa, The Rediscoverers: Major Writers in the Portuguese Literature of National Regeneration (1981). The impact of the 17th-century Portuguese Letters on national identity is analyzed in Anna Klobucka, The Portuguese Nun (2000). The intellectual climate of the 18th century is the subject of Ronald W. Sousa (ed.), Problems of Enlightenment in Portugal: Essays (1984). Alexander Coleman, Eça de Queirós and European Realism (1980), examines the place of the 19th-century Portuguese realist novel in Europe.Essays on the principal literary genres and their development in the 20th century can be found in Nelson H. Vieira (ed.), Roads to Today's Portugal: Essays on Contemporary Portuguese Literature, Art, and Culture (1983). A comprehensive view of literature after the 1974 revolution can be found in Helena Kaufman and Anna Klobucka (eds.), After the Revolution: Twenty Years of Portuguese Literature, 1974–1994 (1997). Women's writing after the revolution received much attention in the last decades of the 20th century. Darlene J. Sadlier, The Question of How: Women Writers and New Portuguese Literature (1989), covers the novel. Surveys of women's literature include Cláudia Pazos Alonso and Glória Frenandes (eds.), Women, Literature, and Culture in the Portuguese-Speaking World (1996); and Hilary Owen, Portuguese Women's Writing, 1972 to 1986: Reincarnations of a Revolution (2000).Two major journals publish studies in English on a variety of topics in Portuguese literature: Portuguese Studies (semiannual); and Luso-Brazilian Review (semiannual).William C. Atkinson Norman Jones Lamb Luís de Sousa Rebelo K. David Jackson

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