The naturalist theatre in Portugal: evolution and developments

• Grant number: 09/16114-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: March 08, 2010
• End date: June 07, 2010
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Other Vernacular Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Renata Soares Junqueira
• Grantee: Renata Soares Junqueira
• Host Investigator: Fernando Manuel Cabral Martins
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract

This project proposes an investigation into the theatre that had been produced in Portugal, under the influence of Naturalism, in the last three shining decades of the 19th century, and into the developments of this theatre until the first twenty years of the following century, mainly through the analysis of chosen plays of some authors. These writers, although occupying distinct places in the history of Portuguese theatre, are not very well-known yet among Brazilian academic and artistic institutions: Guerra Junqueiro and Guilherme de Azevedo, Marcelino Mesquita, Abel Botelho, Eduardo Schwalbach, D. João da Câmara and the couple Júlio and Raul Brandão at the end of the 19th century, and Coelho de Carvalho, Manuel Laranjeira, Henrique Lopes de Mendonça, Ponce de Leão, Ramada Curto, Vitoriano Braga, Carlos Selvagem and Alfredo Cortez in the beginning of the 20th century. The guiding idea of the present research is the one that, in theatre, the naturalist aesthetic, with its vocation to unveil the social misfortunes and psychic degenerations of the good bourgeois, has opened the paths for the modern dramaturgy of the Self, which would come to rebel precisely against Naturalism at the end of the XIX century. (AU)