Obscene voices in eighteenth-century portuguese poetry

Abstract

Abstract: This study offers a rereading of the obscene verse in Portuguese poetry in the second half of the 18 th -century. The main goal is to integrate a poetics of obscenity not only in the classical heritage, as has been pointed out by literary criticism (CIDADE, 1986; PIRES, 2004; NEUMANN, 2006), or more overtly by studies of rhetoric-stylistic content (PECORA, 2011), but to understand this singular production, largely ignored within the academy, within the broad context of the social and cultural uses of the verse. This line of interpretation also situates obscene poetry in two converging contexts, which we consider decisive for its analysis. This writing occurs at a time when the very modern concept of lyric poetry, as expressive and subjective capital, was in formation. at the same time, the obscene is related to the protocols of truth and concealment promoted by the secular process opened by the Enlightenment, thus having a profound relationship with the transformations that occur in Portuguese society in the last decades of the 18 th -century.