Portuguese literature

The beginnings of Portuguese literature are to be found in medieval Galician-Portuguese poetry, originally developed in Galicia and northern Portugal. The Golden Age is considered to have been the Renaissance period,with the writings of Gil Vicente, Bernardim Ribeiro, Sá de Miranda and especially the great epic poet Luís de Camões, author of national and epic poem Os Lusíadas. The seventeenth century was marked by the introduction of the Baroque in Portugal and is generally regarded as the century of literary decadence, despite the existence of writers like Father António Vieira, Padre Manuel Bernardes and Francisco Rodrigues Lobo.

The writers of the eighteenth century tried to counteract a certain decadence of the baroque stage by making an effort to recover the level of quality attained during the Golden Age, through the creation of academies and literary Arcadias - it was the time of Neoclassicism. In the nineteenth century, the neoclassical ideals were abandoned, where Almeida Garrett introduced Romanticism, followed by Alexandre Herculano and Camilo Castelo Branco.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Realism (of naturalistic features) developed in novel-writing, whose exponents included Eça de Queiroz and Ramalho Ortigão. Literary trends during the twentieth century are represented mainly by Fernando Pessoa, considered as one of the greatest national poets together with Camões, and, in later years, by the development of prose fiction, thanks to authors such as António Lobo Antunes and José Saramago, winner of the Nobel prize for Literature.

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