Eça de Queiroz / Maria Filomena Mónica ; translated by Alison Aiken.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mónica, Maria Filomena, 1943-

Contributor:

Aiken, Alison.

Series:

Colección Támesis. Monografías ; Serie A, 215.

Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografías ; 215

Standardized Title:

Eça de Queirós. English

Language:

English

Portuguese

Subjects (All):

Queirós, Eça de, 1845-1900.

Queirós, Eça de.

Authors, Portuguese--19th century--Biography.

Authors, Portuguese.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xvi, 429 pages, 17 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, map, portraits ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK ; Rochester, NY : Tamesis, 2005.

Summary:

Eca de Queiroz (1845-1900) was considered by V.S. Pritchett as a writer who must rank with Proust as one of the greatest of European novelists. For Zola he was 'far greater than my own dear master, Flaubert'. Had Queiroz written in a language other than his native Portuguese he would undoubtedly have been, and be, much more famous. His novels illuminate nineteenth-century Portuguese society as those of Dickens reveal Victorian England and indeed have become so ingrained in the Portuguese consciousness that it is Queiroz's depiction, rather than historical fact, which governs his countrymen's view of their past.

The author of The Crime of Father Amaro, Cousin Basilio and The Maias, novels which shocked his bourgeois contemporaries because of their anticlericalism and their frank treatment of incest, infidelity and violence, was also a distinguished diplomat and journalist, who lived in Cuba, England and France in the course of his consular duties, sending home perceptive analyses of contemporary social and political problems in the form of newspaper articles and official reports.

This is the first scholarly biography of Eca de Queiroz available in English. As Sir Raymond Carr says in his Foreword, 'Surely this splendidly written and compulsively readable book will shake us out of our provincial ignorance of modern Portuguese literature and of Eca, one of the greatest novelists of his age.'

Contents:

Part I The Early Years, in Portugal

1 Childhood 3

2 Coimbra 10

3 Discovering the Capital 24

4 Evora 31

5 Return to the Capital 45

6 Egypt 53

7 The Mysteries of Leiria 64

8 The Casino Lectures 85

Part II The Wider World

9 Cuba 103

10 Father Amaro in Newcastle 118

11 The Realist Novel 139

12 Abandoned Works 166

13 A Fantasy 180

14 The Other Eca 185

15 Engagement and Marriage 202

16 A Picaresque Experiment 214

17 The Masterpiece 228

Part III The Final Years, in Paris

18 Paris Days 257

19 Between Paris and Lisbon - the Vencidos da Vida 276

20 The Ultimatum in the Revista de Portugal 287

21 An Imaginary Dandy 311

22 Spleen 339

23 Bucolic Temptation 362

24 The Final Novel 373

25 Death 381

26 The Second Death 388.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [407]-413) and index.

ISBN:

1855661152

OCLC:

58546894