Almeida Garrett
1799–1854
Biography
João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, known in English as Almeida Garrett, was born in Porto in 1799 and died in 1854. He was a Portuguese poet, orator, playwright, novelist, journalist and liberal politician, and he is generally regarded as the greatest figure of Portuguese Romanticism. The liberal upheavals of the 1820s forced him into exile in England and France, where he came under the influence of Shakespeare, Walter Scott and Gothic taste. Back in Portugal he founded newspapers, became one of the leading orators of the liberal cause, served as consul-general in Brussels, and was made a viscount in 1852.
Garrett worked to build a Portuguese theatre. He proposed the D. Maria II National Theatre and the creation of a conservatory of dramatic art, and he wrote historical plays for the stage. His early poems Camões (1825) and Dona Branca (1826) are often treated as the first Romantic works in Portuguese. In Romanceiro e Cancioneiro Geral (1843) he gathered traditional ballads and songs, and his historical novel O Arco de Santana, begun in 1845 and completed in 1850, showed the more complex and subjective prose he went on to develop.
The book on this site is Viagens na Minha Terra (Travels in My Homeland), first published in 1846. In it Garrett experimented with the more complex and subjective prose of the later part of his career, mixing travel, digression, reflection and story in a conversational voice. It is among the landmarks of Portuguese Romantic prose. The catalogue lists the complete text under the title Viagens na Minha Terra (Completo), so readers can meet the whole book.
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Books
Viagens na Minha Terra (Completo)
by João Batista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett Almeida Garrett
The narrator makes a short journey from Lisbon to Santarém and fills it with digressions on politics, art and Portugal. Along the way he tells the love story of Joaninha, the girl with the nightingale eyes, and her cousin Carlos, caught up in the war between liberals and…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.