Transinfluências

: (po)ética nos contos de Mary Lavin e de Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

Abstract

This work intends to create dialogues between Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Mary Lavin’s short stories. These writers did not influence each other’s oeuvre, but they were influenced by similar socio-political contexts – Portugal and Ireland’s Catholic and conservative societies of mid-twentieth century. They also shared similar (aesth)etic concerns, considering the written word as a medium of truth, meaning the revelation of the experienced reality in the written work. There is a constant friction between this reality and the moral imperatives of Sophia and Lavin’s poetics, which is well patent in their works.
This thesis analyses, in the first part, the historical contexts in which the two writers created the selected short stories. Afterwards, a selection of six short stories will be studied in a comparative literature exercise, with the intent of understanding how they react to their historical realities. The sociocultural discourses of gender, of the Catholic Church and of the political regimes in force will be emphasized. A critical voice traverses these narratives, which present and upturn these discourses with the purpose of denouncing their faults to the reader. The great tension lies in the opposition between appearance and
substance, between the moral and religious values professed by the characters (subject to the sociocultural discourses of the authors’ historical contexts) and their practical reality. The reader, as the addressee of the narratives, gains proeminence as the intentional agent of the dialogue between them and, not less important, as the receiver of each one’s messages.

Date of Award	22 Jan 2018
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Alexandra Lopes (Supervisor)