詩 Section 08
Literature
From Camões to Pessoa and Saramago — a literature across continents.
16 articles
Literature in Portuguese — an overview
Eight centuries of literature in Portuguese, from the troubadour cantigas to the contemporary novel: a map of the tradition and its great voices, in Portugal, Brazil and Africa.
Medieval Literature and the Songbooks
The Galician-Portuguese troubadour lyric of the 13th and 14th centuries — love songs, songs of a friend, and satire — and the three great songbooks that preserved it.
Gil Vicente
The founder of Portuguese theatre, Gil Vicente brought to the early-16th-century stage a living, plural language — a precious record of the spoken Portuguese of his day.
Luís de Camões
The supreme poet of the Portuguese language — soldier and wanderer, author of an intense lyric body of work and of the epic Os Lusíadas — to the point that the language itself is called "the tongue of Camões".
Os Lusíadas
Luís de Camões's epic (1572): ten cantos in ottava rima celebrating Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, and the work that made Portuguese a literary monument of the Renaissance.
The Baroque and Padre António Vieira
The Baroque prose of the Portuguese seventeenth century and the oratory of António Vieira (1608–1697), in which the language reaches one of its high points of wit and architecture.
Romanticism — Garrett and Herculano
The movement that renewed Portuguese letters in the nineteenth century, founded by Almeida Garrett and Alexandre Herculano, and which gave the language a new prose and the rediscovery of the popular voice.
Realism and Eça de Queirós
How Realism entered Portugal through the Generation of 70, and how Eça de Queirós turned the novel into an instrument of social analysis — and permanently renewed Portuguese prose.
The Generation of 1870 and Cesário Verde
The Generation of 1870's revolt against Romanticism — the Coimbra Question, the thought and sonnets of Antero de Quental, and Cesário Verde's urban poetry, herald of modernism.
Fernando Pessoa and the heteronyms
How a single Lisbon poet split into a crowd of authors — Caeiro, Reis, Campos — each with a biography, ideas and, above all, a language of his own.
Modernism and Presença
From the revolution of Orpheu (1915) through the avant-gardes to the living art of Presença and the social turn of Neo-Realism — twentieth-century Portuguese literature told through its reviews.
José Saramago
The only Portuguese-language writer awarded the Nobel (1998), and the creator of a flowing, near-unpunctuated prose that reinvented the narrative voice in Portuguese.
Twentieth-century Portuguese poetry
After Pessoa, four major voices — Sophia, Eugénio de Andrade, Miguel Torga and Herberto Helder — remade Portuguese lyric, from classical exactness to visionary delirium.
Brazilian Literature
From Machado de Assis to the 1922 Modernists and Clarice Lispector — the great Portuguese-language literature that Brazil built, from Machado's irony to the introspective prose of the twentieth century.
African literatures in Portuguese
The literatures of Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe — from Agostinho Neto and Craveirinha to Pepetela and Mia Couto — and their reinvention of Portuguese.
Literary prizes and institutions
The Camões Prize, Saramago's Nobel, and the language academies — the awards and institutions that consecrate, standardise, and project literature written in Portuguese.