A Visit to the First Portuguese Novelist at São Miguel de Seide

Alberto PimentelProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2
Word count
37K words
Chapters
4

Tags

Foreign Language Books Foreign LiteratureLiterary Figures Literary GiantsHumanistic CareIntellectual CommentaryExotic CultureCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Uma visita ao primeiro romancista portuguez em S. Miguel de Seide by PimentelAuthor: Pimentel, Alberto, 1849-1925,Language: Portuguese, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Jan 31, 2011

Editor's review

This work is Alberto Pimentel's account of a visit to the home of Portugal's first Romantic novelist. Written in Portuguese and short in length, it blends travelogue, literary anecdote, and a pilgrimage to a writer's house; readers can see how nineteenth-century Portuguese literary men commemorated their predecessors, along with spatial details around S. Miguel de Seide tied to the novelist's life. Its value lies chiefly in its documentary quality and sense of presence: the author records the visit from a firsthand perspective, turning a topic in literary history into a walk one can sense and see. For those studying the reception history of Portuguese Romanticism, writing about writers' houses, or simply wanting to encounter nineteenth-century Portuguese prose in the original, this is a light and enjoyable piece of material. Readers should not expect a systematic biography or in-depth criticism; it is better read as a fragment of a literary pilgrimage, ideally alongside background on the novelist's life. The free electronic edition makes searching and comparing with the original convenient.

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Reading tips

  1. First learn about the visited novelist's life and major works, then read this text to understand whom the author is commemorating.
  2. Read paragraph by paragraph alongside the original, marking details about the house's spaces and personal recollections.
  3. Treat the text as field notes on literary history; after reading, write a short impression or imagined visit of your own.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4

FAQ

In what language is this book written, and what language level is needed? The original is in Portuguese, nineteenth-century Portuguese prose. An intermediate-to-advanced reading ability in Portuguese is enough to get through it; beginners should use a dictionary or a bilingual edition, first grasping the visit and the relationships among people, then tackling the literary anecdotes.
Is it a novel or a factual visit account? Judging by the title and genre, it is a visit account recording the author's trip to S. Miguel de Seide to see places associated with Portugal's first Romantic novelist. It is closer to a literary travelogue and commemorative text than to a fictional novel; while reading, pay attention to on-site description and the tone of remembrance.
What background should I know before reading? It helps to know the basic outlines of Portuguese Romantic literature, the visited novelist's life and major works, and the connection between S. Miguel de Seide and his later years. With that, you can understand why the author made the trip and the weight of the details in the text.
How is the electronic edition best used? The free electronic edition is convenient for full-text searching, excerpting, and comparing with the original; it suits collecting material on literary history or use as language-learning material. Read through once to grasp the structure, then search back by place, person, or quotation to build your own notes.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Alberto Pimentel Author · Portuguese · 1849–1925

Alberto Pimentel (1849–1925) was a Portuguese writer, journalist and literary historian, born in Porto and died in Cruz. He was a prolific author with nearly a hundred works, spanning poetry, fiction, drama, biography and political writing, and combining literary research with journalism. His research focused especially on the Portuguese novelist Camilo Castelo Branco, and his representative works include Uma visita ao primeiro romancista portuguez em S. Miguel de Seide. He also wrote Os Poetas do Minho, As Noites do Asceta, Historias de Reis e Principes, A ultima ceia do Doutor Fausto and O Romance da Rainha Mercedes, works that draw on historical anecdote, legend and observation of contemporary life, in a solid and vividly narrative style. The library holds 19 of his works.