Often regarded as a small and homogeneous country, modern Portugal has frequently displayed clear regional tensions, on several ‘axes’: between its capital, Lisbon, and more neglected cities and towns; between its developed coastline and its (noticeably declining) inland villages; between the relatively conservative small-holding communities of the North and the politically radical tenant farmers of the South, amongst others. Examining twentieth-century novelists’ treatment of such geographical precepts leads one to ponder: what relationships exist between ideology and (regional) spaces? Through analysis of narrative fiction, how can one better comprehend the complex geographical grievances and identity politics that are increasingly characterising ideological discourses across Western nations? The novels of Aquilino Ribeiro (1885-1963), Agustina Bessa-Luís (1922-2019), Lídia Jorge (1946-) and José Saramago (1922-2010) all have their part to play, in this quest for greater understanding of Portuguese regionalisms and resistances.
Peter Haysom-Rodríguez is a Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Leeds. He holds a Ph.D. in Portuguese & Lusophone Studies from the University of Nottingham.
Regionalisms and Resistance in the Twentieth-Century Portuguese Novel: Spatialized Ideologies - front matter Peter Haysom-Rodríguez doi:10.59860/shlc.c049551
Contents, acknowledgements, and notes on the text.
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Introduction: Politicizing the Region, Resisting through the Rustic Peter Haysom-Rodríguez doi:10.59860/shlc.c15898e
Regionalisms and Resistance conducts a diachronic study of the interactions between regions, regionalisms, ideologies and resistances, in selected Portuguese novels published during the twentieth century.
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Chapter 1: ‘Outside Lisbon there is nothing’: Political and Cultural Regionalisms in Modern Portugal Peter Haysom-Rodríguez doi:10.59860/shlc.c267dd5
The Lisboner João da Ega, from Eça de Queiroz’s classic 1888 novel Os Maias, proudly articulates a widespread assumption: that the national capital is Portugal’s sole locus of political, social, economic and cultural significance. But the geographical complexities of (continental) Portugal are not confined to the binary tensions between capital and province — one must also consider dichotomies that have developed between urban and rural communities within a given region, between the North and South of the country, between territories experiencing unique sociological and historical material conditions, and between the litoral (the coastline, mostly developed) and the interior (inland areas, sparsely populated). This chapter takes the factors above into account, outlining the importance of regional tensions in Portugal from the end of the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, encompassing the final years of the monarchy, the First Republic (1910–26), Portugal’s dictatorial era (1926–74), the revolutionary period (1974–76) and the post-1976 democratic epoch.
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Chapter 2: ‘A cheap rebellion’: Aquilino Ribeiro’s Ambivalent Regional Resistance Peter Haysom-Rodríguez doi:10.59860/shlc.c37721c
Aquilino Ribeiro (1885–1963) has long been respected as a canonical author in Portugal, during his lifetime and after his death, leading to his interment within Lisbon’s National Pantheon in 2007; his fiction encompasses a multitude of novellas, crónicas, short stories and novels. Although some of his works are located in urban environments, he is commonly regarded in Portuguese literary criticism and in the nation’s collective imagination as a ‘regionalist’, who brought the landscapes, language and agricultural communities of his native Beira Alta region (particularly the Serra da Nave and Serra da Lapa highlands) into representation. At the same time, Ribeiro’s political interventions and activism have been well documented, including his association with violent Republican activists in 1908 before fleeing to Paris in exile, his participation in armed attempts to overthrow the Ditadura Nacional in 1927, and his public support in the late 1940s and 1950s for the Movimento de Unidade Democrática which sought the demise of the Estado Novo.
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Chapter 3: ‘I don’t identify with this feminist provincialism’: The Regionalist Sexual Politics of Agustina Bessa-Luís and Lídia Jorge Peter Haysom-Rodríguez doi:10.59860/shlc.c4865ff
This chapter analyses Agustina Bessa-Luís’s novel Sibila and Lídia Jorge’s Dia as case studies of a more gendered exploration of regional dynamics. Both novels feature bucolic life, with fetishized images of the ‘rural women’ of the Entre-Douro-e-Minho and Algarve, who include sibylline or ‘prophetess’ characters. But they are also ironic, subversive novels, and in the case of both writers, sexual politics interact with regionalist ideological dynamics, to produce ambivalent and complex images of the ‘rural woman’ and her agency within Salazarist (and post-Salazarist) Portuguese society.
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Chapter 4: ‘We imagined we lived at the end of the world’: José Saramago’s Militant Particularisms Peter Haysom-Rodríguez doi:10.59860/shlc.c595a46
Upon winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, José Saramago paid tribute to his illiterate peasant grandfather, from the Ribatejan village of Azinhaga. He never forgot his family origins, and that interest extended into politics: throughout his life he supported militant anti-poverty and land reform campaigns. His novels, too, were sensitive to regional dynamics, and this chapter takes Levantado and Caverna as cases in point. Spatiality and ‘regionalist’ discourse are shown to be inseparable from Saramago’s ideological militancy.
Regional-rural environments should not be regarded as static, docile or archaic, but as dynamic, volatile and fundamental components of modern Portuguese society. Numerous Portuguese novels have foregrounded, rather than disposed of, their rural episodes, with regional dynamics, landscapes and tropes becoming integral parts of more complex ideological discourses. In particular, novels by Aquilino Ribeiro, Agustina Bessa-Luís, Lídia Jorge and José Saramago display a preoccupation with confounding territorial preconceptions, and with manipulating regional tensions for differing political aims.
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Bibliography entry:
Haysom-Rodríguez, Peter, Regionalisms and Resistance in the Twentieth-Century Portuguese Novel: Spatialized Ideologies, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, 63 (Legenda, 2024)
First footnote reference:35 Peter Haysom-Rodríguez, Regionalisms and Resistance in the Twentieth-Century Portuguese Novel: Spatialized Ideologies, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, 63 (Legenda, 2024), p. 21.
Subsequent footnote reference:37 Haysom-Rodríguez, p. 47.
Haysom-Rodríguez, Peter. 2024. Regionalisms and Resistance in the Twentieth-Century Portuguese Novel: Spatialized Ideologies, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, 63 (Legenda)
Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Haysom-Rodríguez 2024: 21).
Example footnote reference:35 Haysom-Rodríguez 2024: 21.
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16 August 2024 • 196pp