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THE TEAM
CONTACT
The study also benefitted greatly from the first general approach that had marked the História da Literatura Portuguesa [History of Portuguese Literature] (1949), which went on to boast regular editions. This latter text was in turn influenced by the more extensive chapters written against the framework of a wide historical-literary scenario co-authored with Óscar Lopes, História da Literatura Portuguesa (1954), his long-standing friend, party comrade and interlocutor. It is particularly noteworthy that this is the most edited, disseminated, and influential work in the field, constituting, despite its underlying sociologism but also perhaps precisely because of it, a breath of critical renewal that shaped the national literary canon in the second half of the 20th century. It should also be noted that the above-mentioned personal História da Cultura em Portugal, an extensive, cultural, sociological, and ideological-literary analysis, included some of the findings which had already been discussed in Para a história da cultura ... (1946). This collection offered a compilation of texts on the sociology of literature, the epic of Camões – one of the Renaissance writers on whose work A.J. Saraiva had written innovative critical analyses – and an essay on Almeida Garrett, as well as the findings of the first in-depth research inquiries into the work of Oliveira Martins. The latter, a pillar of the Geração de 70 [the Generation of 1870], was the great historical-literary passion of A. J. Saraiva throughout his life which was characterised by intense camaraderie with the greatest figures of national literature and a predilection for nineteenth-century masters. In that highly productive decade of 1940, among other less celebrated texts, he also published the following works on those very same writers: As ideias de Eça de Queirós [The ideas of Eça de Queirós] (1946), a book which was awarded a prize by the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa [the Lisbon Academy of Sciences]; A evolução do teatro de Garrett (1948) [The evolution of Garrett’s drama]; Herculano e o liberalismo em Portugal [Herculano and liberalism in Portugal] (1949); A obra de Júlio Dinis e a sua época [The work of Júlio Dinis and his era] (1949).
As might have been predicted, and as illustrated in some of Saraiva's previous analyses in which the attempt to establish a methodological shift and a new conceptual strategy was already perceptible, the vast trilogy devoted to the culture of a European multi-secular country with diverse and premature transcontinental acculturations was framed by the principles and methods of Marxist sociologism. He then resorted to general history for which, from an evolutionistic angle, he provided a broad introductory framework.
