Portuguese literature

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

Portuguese Literature, published in 1922 by the English Hispanist Aubrey F. G. Bell, was for decades the only full history of its subject in English. Bell begins with the cossantes and the medieval song-books of 1185 to 1325, moves through the early prose, the chroniclers and the Cancioneiro Geral, and devotes his longest section to the sixteenth century: the plays of Gil Vicente, the lyric and bucolic poets, the historians of the discoveries, and Camoes and the Lusiads. Later chapters cover the baroque seiscentistas, the eighteenth-century academies, the Romantic school of Garrett and Herculano and the generation of Antero de Quental and Eca de Queiroz down to 1910. An appendix treats folk literature and the Galician revival. The full text is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, and the first chapter is free.