Aesthetics and Ideology in Queirós's A Cidade e as Serras
Abstract
In his article "Aesthetics and Ideology in Queirós's A Cidade e as Serras" Pedro Serra contributes to the study of Eça de Queirós's post-naturalist fiction, offering an in-depth view of traces of utopian socialism -- a major ideological influence in Queirós's intellectual generation -- in the aesthetic fabric of A Cidade e as Serras (1901) (The City and the Mountains). According to Serra, who reads this novel in light of Oliveira Martins's socialist idearium, Queirós's post-naturalistic writing exposes a complex network of late nineteenth-century cultural predicaments: the collapse of liberalism and realism paves the way to an ideological and aesthetical poetics of the novel that incorporates a paternalist socialism incarnated by Jacinto, the protagonist of the narrative. Serra suggests that Queirós's late poetics of the novel imply the anesthetization of "ethnic" determinations, a process that results from the Portuguese resistance to the nightmarish avatars of Modernity -- emblematically represented by Paris, a dystopian metropolis -- and that is represented in what Serra calls theatrum anthropologicum, a set of figures that determine the meaning of being Portuguese.
Recommended Citation
Serra, Pedro. "Aesthetics and Ideology in Queirós's A Cidade e as Serras." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11.3 (2009): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol11/iss3/2
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