The travel narrative as a Modus Vivendi of Portuguese and (Luso)-Brazilian Literature through Centuries

The article offers a sustained overview of all significant Portuguese travel narratives, with an appendix which carries a brief overview of the Brazilian literary travelogue tradition due to a strong interweaving of the two great Lusophone literatures. Luso-Brazilian travel narrative as a literary genre (or, genre with literary pretentions) is characterized by a marked hybridity (for example, the interweaving of journal, autobiography and memoirs) and their manifold (practical) purpose (nautical, ethnographic, tourist, pilgrim, political, diplomatic), which has often dictated its own structure. Portugal, and its culture and civilization, has due to its historical and geographical conditions been almost by default oriented towards travel narratives as a conditio sine qua non not only of its literary and cultural but also national and political survival. Therefore it is reasonable to argue that the travel narrative represents a modus vivendi of the entire Portuguese, and for the most part also Brazilian (i.e. Luso-Brazilian) literature through centuries, since Lusitanic identity has by the quirk of fate been informed precisely by facing off the other and the different, by its relentless search for the “selfness,” that could be grasped only in the clash with its presumable negation—a clash which experiences its literary affirmation (and dramatization) precisely in the travel writing. It is therefore not surprising that both the Portuguese and the Brazilians (as the former’s cultural inheritors) have emphatically used the travel narrative each time their (oftentimes almost “presumptuous”) self-assurance came to (historic) test. Moreover, some of the very best Luso-Brazilian travel narratives (whereby one naturally thinks of a complex hybrid literary genre of the predominantly essayistic features, and not of the tourist guides), were created exactly in the moments of considerable social ruptures and crises. What might be the exact reason for this, however, still remains to be seen