As Recordações de Itália (1852-1853), de A. P. Lopes de Mendonça: uma obra política: edição e estudo crítico

Abstract

António Pedro Lopes de Mendonça, a romantic writer with a liberal radical political position, who made his living out of literature, has left a written legacy which has flirted with many genres, from chronic to serial novels yet always permeated by a political bias. He has defended the extra-literary Romanticism as a movement that helped propel crucial changes in Portuguese society, affiliated to the Jacobin politics, and he was a precursor of socialist ideals in Portugal. He has made opposition to regeneration, understanding that the efforts of this government were inadequate to the needs of the country; but could recognize later changes promoted by him, advocating in favor of the regenerators when compared to the absolutists. He was considered ultra romantic by many authors, which we consider a reductionist classification, because it does not consider a essential aspect of the works of this author: the goal of forming critical readers, the civilizational commitment, educating and opposing the injustices of his time. Mendonça used irony in his favor, as a thinking strategy, to accommodate the lines of his novels, his criticism of the society he lived in. Having traveled throughout Italy while it was not yet unified, the trip that inspired Recordações de Itália. He could then see how the lack of unity of the revolutionary groups around a common ideal was a force against the unification of the country; and he called, through his newspaper Eco dos Operários, the lower classes to the quest for social justice, giving space to texts of the workers themselves and convincing them of the importance of the union of forces for a major cause. He died being considered crazy, certainly for not accepting and not fitting in the hypocrisies and injustices that were imposed by that society