Modernity and Modernism in Portugal: The ‘Questão Coimbra’ and the Generation of 1870

Abstract

Argues against the popular notion that Portuguese modernism begins with publication of the Lisbon-based literary journal Orpheus in 1915. Claims the conditions for an emergent modernism were formed much earlier, in the context of a literary/political debate of the middle and late nineteenth century known as the “Questão Coimbrã,” the Coimbra Question. Suggests artistic modernism in Europe, and especially in Portugal, needs to be understood as a complex response to industrial modernity, and that many of the tendencies associated with modern art – a rejection of bourgeois values, a desire to “make it new,” a promotion of vanguard ideas – were taking shape far in advance of Portugal’s actual modernization, in a series of polemical essays that were the subject of considerable controversy.