Early Portuguese Novels of Contemporary Life: Social Depravity and Idealistic Excess

Abstract

In this study, I reassess two “minor” texts from our early phase of novelistic production, written between the two decades that separate Garrett’s Viagens (1843-1846) and the works of Júlio Dinis (published between 1866 and 1871): Memórias de um Doido (1849/1859), by António Pedro Lopes de Mendonça, which José Augusto França more recently reprinted, and another novel that has nearly been forgotten, O Céltico (1852), by D. João de Azevedo. This paper wishes to highlight how, even though lacking in literary value, these novels document, with a marked satirical sensibility, an important ideological and literary juncture: on the one hand, the condemnation of the moral falsehood, social corruption and political cunning of mid-century pseudo liberalism, marred by power games, greed and nepotism; on the other, the penchant of lyrical poetry (ultra-romanticism), also relevant in fiction, to center on the aspirations of the poetic soul and its yearning for a light that allows one to escape the pettiness of the real.