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| History of Portuguese Literature | Origins of Portuguese Literature | The Portuguese Language | Oral Literature | Fiction | Lyricism |
| Travel Literature | Cantigas de amigo | Historiography | Doctrinal Prose | ||
| Baroque and Mannerism | Classics | Existentialism | Experimentalism | Enlightenment | Modernity |
| Neo-Realism | Post-Modernism | Realism | Romanticism | Saudosismo | Symbolism |
Post-Modernism
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A
polemical label, popularised by philosophical controversies (Lyotard/Habermas),
which is frequently pinned on many different kinds of contemporary literature,
but is taken seriously from the literary point of view by American groups and
authors and has been canonised through countless academic studies and theses
defended at universities both in America and Northern Europe.
In
Portugal, its possible effects on literature were not only feared, but were also
denied and repressed. This can easily be understood from the point of view of
the belated democratisation of our society and the long battles waged by writers
to obtain the sort of conditions that would permit the free exercise of a much
desired modernity.
Whatever
the case, the refusal to distinguish between different modes of narration, the
taste for rewriting and parody, the seductive appeal of altering and correcting
events from the past, the taste for the fantastic, the rejection of axiologies
and the tendency towards randomness can all be glimpsed in such different texts
as Finisterra, by Carlos
de Oliveira, Alexandra Alpha, by José
Cardoso Pires, Paixão do Conde de Fróis,
by Mário de Carvalho, História
do Cerco de Lisboa, by José Saramago,
Contos do Mal Errante, by Maria
Gabriela Llansol, Os Guarda-Chuvas
Cintilantes, by Teolinda Gersão or Olhos Verdes, by Luísa
Costa Gomes.
© Instituto Camões, 2001
