Portuguese Literature and the Environment

Victor K. Mendes is associate professor of Portuguese, director of the PhD program in Luso-Afro-Brazilian studies and theory, and director of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture/Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.Patrícia Vieira is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese, comparative literature, and film and media studies at Georgetown University and associate research professor at the Center for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra.

Mendes and Vieira have collected 12 essays on Portuguese authors and the presence and influence of environmental features in their works. Ranging from medieval lyrical poetry to 19th- and 20-century authors, the collection includes essays on Júlio Dinis (1839–71), Eça de Queirós (1845–1900), Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1919–2004), and José Saramago (1922–2010). Two essays extend to hunting in colonial Africa and 16th-century descriptions of Brazil by Caminha and Gandavo. As the introduction notes, environmental research is still in its initial stages, lacking clear distinctions between images of nature, features of geographical location such as the sea, or images of animals, plants, and landscape in literature. A central question is whether nature, as common literary theme and context, can have an enhanced meaning when recast as environment.Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

• IntroductionChapter 1. A Portuguese Approach to the Environmental CrisisChapter 2. Environment, Nature and Landscape: Conceptual Affinities and Distinctions in the Portuguese ContextChapter 3. Inter-, Multi- and Trans-Disciplinarity: New Horizons for Portuguese Environmental HistoryChapter 4. Elemental PortugalChapter 5. “Songs of Stance”Chapter 6. Portuguese Environmental Perceptions of Brazil in the Sixteenth CenturyChapter 7. Nature’s Literary Lessons: Júlio Dinis on Literature and the EnvironmentChapter 8. “On Borrowed ‘Women’s Time’: Ecological Female Bodies and the Re-Engendering of Nature in Eça de Queirós’s A Cidade e as Serras”Chapter 9. Hunters of Empire: João Teixeira de Vasconcelos’s Colonial Memoirs of African HuntingChapter 10. Environmentalizing Fernando Pessoa's ModernismChapter 11. The Posthuman Poetry of Sophia de Mello Breyner AndresenChapter 12. The Environment and José Saramago’s Literary Program in Journey to Portugal.In Pursuit of Portugal’s History and Culture