Eça de Queirós

Eça de Queirós was a Portuguese novelist and diplomat whose realist fiction, including The Maias and The Crime of Father Amaro, criticized social institutions and convention.

The Maias: A novel by Eça de Queirós tracing the decline of the Maia family amid Lisbon society. His best-known novel makes aristocratic decadence and family tragedy central to his social portrait.
Literary realism: A literary mode that depicts everyday life and social conditions through plausible detail. Queirós adapted realist description to expose the institutions and habits of Portuguese society.
Generation of 1870: A group of Portuguese writers and intellectuals who sought cultural and political renewal in the late nineteenth century. Queirós joined its critiques of Portuguese conservatism and literary convention.
Ramalho Ortigão: A Portuguese writer and journalist who collaborated with Eça de Queirós on satirical fiction. Their joint work helped launch Queirós’s literary career and sharpened his satirical voice.
The Crime of Father Amaro: A novel by Eça de Queirós about a young priest whose affair exposes clerical hypocrisy. Its attack on religious authority made the novel a defining controversy of his career.
Naturalism: A literary movement that emphasizes heredity, environment, and social forces shaping human behavior. Its deterministic methods informed some of his early novels and their social diagnosis.
Coimbra Question: A nineteenth-century Portuguese literary controversy over Romanticism and emerging modern ideas. The debate marked the intellectual break that helped form Queirós’s generation.
José Maria de Eça de Queirós: The full name of the Portuguese novelist and diplomat known as Eça de Queirós. This formal name appears in biographical and archival contexts for the author.
Cousin Bazilio: A novel by Eça de Queirós about adultery and bourgeois life in Lisbon. Its domestic scandal turns middle-class respectability into a target of satire.
Irony: A rhetorical or literary effect in which meaning differs from the surface expression. His narrators use irony to reveal the gap between public virtue and private conduct.

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