Representações da peste na literatura portuguesa oitocentista

Resumo

In the mediaeval Chronicle of King John I, Fernão Lopes narrates the death by a plague of countless Castilian forces during the Siege of Lisbon. Until the 1840s, this description was basically the only explicit reference in Portuguese literature to one of many epidemic outbreaks in Portugal. However, the firstgeneration Romantic authors, fascinated with macabre and death, began to allude to epidemic diseases and to cholera morbus. From the historical Romanticism of Alexandre Herculano to the critical Realism of Eça de Queiroz, we find diversified descriptions of moments in which some characters, or even the author, lived directly with the plague and how they fought it. Under genealogical forms of novel, drama, short story and poetry, and with Lisbon in the centre of attention for being an urban space with little salubrity, several 19th-century literary texts testify to historical facts, people fleeing away from the city, legal issues to be dealt with at the time of death, rituals of death in intimacy, autobiographical experiences, the abuse of anaesthetics, the symbolic relation between Eros and Thanatos, and entangled emotions in times of pestilence, war, and famine.