Nationalism and Literature in Portugal: Two of the misjudgments of the mainstream (1932-1945)

Abstract

Estado Novo not manage to create a canon of “literary nationalism”, either when it drew a “Política do Espírito”, or when it tried to nationalize and turn into orthodoxy a heterodoxic “mitopoiética” of Fernando Pessoa in Mensagem. From the hermeneutic point of view, nationalism represented for Pessoa a different face to apprehend the prophetic ecumenism that his writing draws, and the universalism, situated and decentered, that his Poetry demands.

Instead, Estado Novo paradoxically adopted Mensagem as a canon in search of mythological roots for its own political assertion and pre-texts underlying its ideological survival.