CULTURE

There is a very long tradition of literary texts dealing with the city in literature. Many of them belong to the genre of literary utopia, founded by Thomas More in 1516. The most common is-sue dealt in these utopias has to do with an at-tempt to balance social conditions and relation-ships. Therefore, they usually present or defend different political statuses as a response to the actual society the author lives in. This means that utopia is naturally conditioned by time and space, and the reader must make an effort to “transport ” him/herself to that time and space if s/he wants to appreciate fully the fictional world construed by the author. This said, utopian literature is rarely part of mainstream literature, or the literary canon, because it springs from a desire to change the status quo, the established social, political and cultural scheme that is responsible for the choice and promotion of an accepted and es-tablished cultural canon. Portuguese literature does not have many exam-ples of successful and renowned utopias, though the considerable amount of published utopias written in foreign languages and translated to Portuguese language being quite relevant. However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, almost at the eve of the second mil-lennium, an important Portuguese utopia was published: Utopia III, written by Pina Martins (1998). This long novel is structured as being the sequel of More’s Utopia, presenting the history and actual status of the mother of all literary utopias. The question at the basis of the whole novel is, “What would More’s Utopia be like today?” The main goal of this text will be to present a literary analysis of Utopia III, focusing on the humanist principles and their adaptation to contemporary society, the search for a har-monious relationship between city and nature, the defence of a Portuguese identity and the appeal to a humanist renewal