The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National MythBucknell University Press, 2000 - 151 pages "This study describes and analyzes cultural and literary mythology surrounding the figure of the seventeenth-century nun Mariana Alcoforado as the presumed author of the celebrated collection of love letters that originally appeared in 1669 in French under the title of Lettres portugaises (known in their many English editions as Portuguese Letters or Letters of a Portuguese Nun). Ostensibly written by a nun cloistered in a provincial Portuguese convent to her departed lover, an officer in the French army, they are nowadays generally reputed to have been a literary fake authored by a seventeenth-century French writer." "The Portuguese Nun describes the foundation and development of the myth of Soror Mariana and illuminates its continuing investment in the fabrication, by the country's cultural elite, of a shared national imagination. It examines the process of national reappropriation of the text from the Romantic period until its latest, postmodern manifestations exemplified most remarkably by the feminist manifesto Novas Cartas Portuguesas [New Portuguese Letters]. From its first "retranslations" into Portuguese in the early nineteenth century, this slim collection of five love letters has retained its status of a somewhat improbable textual support for one of Portugal's most persistently cultivated cultural fictions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
Contents
Acknowledgments | 7 |
Inventing Mariana | 38 |
Translating Mariana | 59 |
Canonizing Mariana | 75 |
Gendering Mariana | 96 |
The Mértola Window | 118 |
Bibliography | 138 |
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Common terms and phrases
Afonso Lopes Vieira Aguiar Alentejo Almeida António appear authenticity authorship Beja book's Camilo Camões Chamilly claim colonial context critical decades edition epistolary essay Europe European female feminine feminist fiction Filinto foreign France freira French gender Guilleragues História da Literatura historical ideological intellectual interpretation invention Jornal da Noite José language Lettres portugaises linguistic Lisboa literary canon literary history Literatura Portuguesa love letters Luciano Cordeiro lyricism Manuel marginality Maria Maria Isabel Barreno Maria Teresa Horta Mariana Alcoforado Mariana's letters Mértola Mértola Window modern myth mythic narrative national identity national literary nineteenth century Novas Cartas Portuguesas Osório periphery political Portugal Portugal's Portuguese cultural Portuguese literary Portuguese literature Portuguese national Portuguese Nun's prominent publication published Ramos regard Ribeiro Rui Ramos Sabugosa Sardinha seventeenth seventeenth-century social Soror Mariana Soror Mariana Alcoforado soul Sousa story Teófilo Braga tion tional tradition translation tuguese Vieira woman women's writing world-system