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However, the idea of the great man adapted well to discourses that were situated far beyond, or even in diametrically opposite positions from the official ideology mirrored in the majority of biographical production. In an atmosphere of regeneration, an ideal that was present across the various political programmes and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, biography became an instrument of active pedagogy and in its plural use a site of dissent during those years of imposed unanimity. This dissent was related to the strictly conventional model of life recording that dominated throughout the Estado Novo period. For example, between the late 1930s and the following decade, Agostinho da Silva inaugurated a long series in the "Cadernos da Seara Nova" ["Seara Nova Booklets"(and continued, on his own initiative, in the "Cadernos de iniciação cultural" [Cultural initiation booklets"]),consisting of biographies of eminent figures of world history. With an explicitly pedagogical purpose, these biographies broke the narrow limits of Portuguese-centric views, as well as those of military feats and governance, similar to what had been proposed decades earlier as criteria for reforming the school curricula. Through non-fictional educational biographies, these heroes of new times, heirs of the democratisation set in motion in the previous century, provided material for a long-awaited "cultural and political revolution"(H. Briosa e Mota, “...ou como, através do relato de vida de grandes homens...”, 2003, pp. 7-14).
Yet even in the more conventional realm of eminent figures of conquest and governance, this atmosphere of regeneration, translated into the "revision" of history that some works sought to achieve, was felt in the products that were less aligned with the dominant discourse. In one of the few reflective texts dedicated to the biographical genre during this period, even though in the form of an introduction to a work, the journalist, writer, and anarchist Mário Domingues went so far as to refer to the biographical writing around great personalities as "the highest aspiration of today's reader," capable of elevating their consciousness as agents of history and, consequently, their condition. With an egalitarian discourse resonating republican ideals, and nuanced by an evident admiration for O. Martins and the systematic reference to great figures of the national past, the text of M. Domingues revealed both historiographical common sense (as would befit a work sponsored by FNAT) and the conscious and plural use of the genre as a tool for social intervention.
