Introductory note—the emergence of Portuguese modernism: contributions to its cultural history

The Spring and Summer of 1915 saw the appearance in Lisbon of the two issues of the modernist magazine Orpheu. Initially intended as a quarterly, the magazine had a short lifespan and, mainly due to financial pressures, the planned third issue failed to be published. In revisiting the historical circumstances of the generation of Orpheu, this special issue of Pessoa Plural is largely driven by a historiographical aim: to reconstruct the socio-cultural context of the earliest modernist manifestations in Portugal and to sketch a kind of 'sociography' of Orpheu, its milieu and its time, which includes the larger international context of the outbreak of WWI and contemporary phenomena in the cultural field in Portugal and abroad.