The city and its characters in the end of the 19th century: Framing the emergence of the urban mass culture in Portugal

Abstract

This article represents a step in a broader research project that aims to study the emer gence of the Portuguese mass culture in the context of modernity. We intend to describe the context of the “printed civilization” from a standpoint of cultural history. This period, that court between the final quarter of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, was the typical scenario of the emergence of a mass culture of urban matrix that involved an entire social transformation. Modernity, since its foundation, built this spectacle made of new social professionals, new urban places of leisure and fun, new social and discursive relations and types. If, during the industrial era and until the dawn of globalization, Portugal extended an essentially agrarian structural reality that corresponded persistently to rural represen tations (constituting factors of resistance to modernity that marked much of our twentieth century), the truth is that in the transition of the nineteenth century to the next, we can identify in the Portuguese society a cultural and social framework of multiplier effects of development that had urban centers as a hub of important changes.