This book is a study in the social history of literature. Portugal's power and prestige began to decline in the mid-1500's, reducing the nation's international standing and self-image to a low point from which it has never fully recovered. In the ensuing years, this book argues, mythicizing the Age of the Discoveries and establishing a link to it have been recurring patterns in Portuguese thought. These patterns are reflected in what is called "the literature of national regeneration."

Portugal's days of glory were short-lived: from the capture of the Arab port of Ceuta in North Africa (1415) to the defeat by the Moors in present-day Morocco (1578). The latter, in which the Portuguese king and the cream of the nobility perished, led to the accession of a Spanish king and to the end, in the Portuguese consciousness, of an era of greatness. The author's introduction discusses the impact on Portugal of "two of the strongest intellectual currents of the age-Renaissance Humanism and a late-Medieval tendency toward prophecy," showing these "involved an extremely idealistic outlook on experience" and that such idealism was subject to frustration. Dr. Sousa shows how the self-image of writers since the Age of the Discoveries "commingles in their minds with the image they have of their nation."

Chapters are devoted to Luis de Camoes and his epic poem Os Lusiadas (1572), Antonia Vieira and his Historia do Futuro (1647-63), Almeida Garrett and his lyric-narrative poem Camos (1825) Eca de Queiroz and his novel A Ilustre Casa de Ramires (1900), and Fernando Pessoa and his volume of poetry Mensagem (1934). Each of these authors is shown to treat the preoccupations of his time-ethical, political, and aesthetic-but with the leitmotif of national regeneration. The book's unique literary-historical synthesis makes it valuable to both Hispanic scholars and those seeking an introduction to Portuguese literature.