A prosa de A. P. Lopes de Mendonça no quadro do romantismo português: romance, crônica, crítica e escritos biográficos

Abstract

António Pedro Lopes de Mendonça was a romantic Portuguese writer for whom literature was not only his means of subsistence, but also an instrument for social transformation. Having gone through practically many of the genres available in his time - novel, short story, biography, chronicles, press and general texts - the author, with a political stance marked by socialism, imbibed his entire writing with the political aspect. In writing, he was a follower of the work of the Romantics of previous generations – like Garrett – whose literary project was part of the mechanisms for social transformation. Radical, affiliated with the Jacobin politics, he strongly opposed governments, using his talent as a journalist to denounce the misacts of the powerful. His work’s main objective was the formation of critical readers, a civilizational commitment to raise awareness and thus be combative to the injustice of their time. Revolutionary, he collaborated with the leading periodicals of the time and founded, with other socialist writers, the first working-day newspaper - in which workers collaborated with the texts themselves. In addition to political journalism, he also acted as a literary and theater critic – being one of the pioneers in contemporary criticism. His work dealt with the main social problems of a troubled time throughout Europe, in which revolution and movements definitively changed the direction of that continent. We seek to demonstrate in this study a panoramic perspective of this work, with politics being the fundamental basis, analyzing texts representing the different genres that Mendonça produced: the political chronicles, which present the ideals to be defended in literature; the urban chronicles - and the author's relationship with the city of Lisbon; chronicles of essays and contemporary literary and theatrical criticism; novels, and the fictional relationship of the nineteenth-century individual with the society; and the biography, a demonstration of historical knowledge and respect for important Portuguese characters