The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal

The first volume of critical essays on the contemporary Portuguese novel in English, this book theorizes the concept of the ‘hypercontemporary’ as a way of reading the novel after its postmodern period.

This inquiry into the notion of the hypercontemporary in its literary and cultural articulations analyzes a varied group of works representative of the most vibrant novels published in Portugal since 2000. The editors’ introductory chapter theorizes the concept of the hypercontemporary as one way of looking at the novel after its postmodern period – especially in its relation to questions of violence, memory and performativity.

These essays show how the Portuguese novel has evolved in the past 25 years, and how, in their diversity, most of these novels exhibit several common traits, including new topics and writing strategies – sometimes developing further entropic lines characteristic of many Postmodern narratives – and themes of violence, rapid transformation, and the many threats to a contemporary world that seems mass-produced due to greater technological advances. Readings also discuss the use of innovative graphic forms available from current print technologies and global networks.

The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal provides a necessary understanding of the current literary landscape of Portugal and, in the process, the aesthetics of hyperrealism or post-postmodernism.

The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal thus represents a landmark in the reflection on the hyper-contemporary novel written in Portuguese, when treatments of the topic are sparse in Portuguese and non-existent in English. Adriana Martins, Associate Professor of Culture Studies, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, Portugal

The unrelenting violence of our time is neither intermittent nor antagonistic to literary form as such – so argue the authors of The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal. Quite the contrary, twenty-first century violence is a process of continuous, indeed accelerating transformation that must be considered a form in its own right. This form distinguishes the work of contemporary Portuguese novelists as “hypercontemporary.’ Key to this periodizing gesture is the idea that the very destruction of form rises to the level of a form as it produces a world where geography disappears and any identifiable form becomes precarious. That even the most tenacious forms of nostalgia cannot survive in such a novel demonstrates how, in the present moment, novels and their readers are still reliving a fascistic and colonial past. A truly remarkable collection! Nancy Armstrong, Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Professor of Trinity College, Duke University, USA

The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal, is an insightful, rich, lucid, thought-provoking, stimulating and a pathbreaking book that explores fictional aesthetics and memory after postmodernism. This is a unique and potentially transformative book that will have wide appeal for scholars and will impact different disciplines. It is a must have book to truly understand the current literary landscape of Portugal. José N. Ornelas, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA