A journey through Pessoa's Message, Presença and the Neo-realism: the outlines of Portuguese literature throughout the 20th century

Abstract

The second quarter of the 20th century was a very interesting period for Portuguese literature, because it saw the intensification of sociopolitical conflicts between major European powers, as well as the rise of totalitarianism in Lusitanian territory, in addition to different main themes in literature, which adopted even antithetical positions in a few cases. In this paper, we aim to outline these main themes based on a selection of three texts: the poem “Ulisses”, from the book Mensagem by Fernando Pessoa; the poem “Narciso”, by José Régio, one of the great exponents of the group and the literary magazine Presença; and the short story “O rapaz não gostava das mãos”, by Alves Redol, one of the representative authors of the Portuguese neo-realism. Each of these texts reveals, in its own way, the political position of their authors in face of the social context at that time, transfigured in literary matter. This analysis demonstrates that those tensions elicited different responses by different authors and, in a broader sense, stimulated several debates on the attributions of literature itself.