A literatura de viagens e as viagens na literatura portuguesa: Entre sonho e realidade

Abstract

The maritime travels of the Portuguese expansion where the most important framework of the so-called Travel Literature in Portugal, which found in Os Lusíadas, of Luís de Camões its most elevated aesthetical achievement. For centuries, the success of the maritime expansion and the Camões’ eulogistic discourse gave the Portuguese nation back an auto image that ideologically wanted to be crystallized. Three authors reintroduced the expansion travels’ theme to give a critical lecture of this secular and anachronistic auto image. As Naus, by Lobo Antunes, Uma Viagem à Índia, by Gonçalo M. Tavares, and O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida, by José Saramago are raised in this article as a new proposition of identity construction.