Fradique e as Lendas de Santos: experimentation and critique in the last Eça de Queirós

Abstract

This project outlines the third part of a broader research that is focused on the works of the so called Last Eça - the final period of Eça de Queirós writer career. The main objective of the research is to frame this Last Eça within the landmarks of twentieth-century avant-garde experience, and to unveil an accurate, but nuanced critique against bourgeois society. The results of the previous stages of the research (a master degree and a doctoral degree) shown that, beyond aesthetic achievement, Eça de Queirós, in his final career stage, made use of modern resources and fundamental characteristics of the novel-essay in order to represent ideology and contradictions of the capitalist order, by using an "immanent critique" (accordingly Adorno).In this final stage of the research, it is proposed to analyze and interpret two eccentric works of Eça's creation: A correspondência de Fradique Mendes and Lendas de santos in accordance with the perspective above. The aim is to test the findings explained above, besides verify in what extent these works also reveal some anticipations of literary processes of Modernism. Thus, the researcher will employ the methodology developed in the previous steps, which is theoretically based on the concept "anti-bourgeois aesthetic" by Dolf Oehler, as the conception of literary project (accordingly John Gledson, among others), and in theoretical principles of comparative studies in literature, as developed by Benjamin Abdala Jr.