Abstract
This study seeks to recover the novel Nova Safo (1912) by Visconde de Vila-Moura from the marginal status to which it has been consigned in Portuguese literary history by arguing for its momentous cultural relevance as Portugal’s first queer novel. Given the extremely limited number and scope of existing critical approaches to the text, my reading is oriented by a reparative strategy that aims, first and foremost, to remedy its precarious status as an archival object. I describe the novel's inchoate and cluttered collection of references, images, and storylines as a countercultural scrapbook of queer feeling, ruled by an antiquarian sensibility, whose structures of cohesion belong less to the realm of formal aesthetics than to the sphere of homophilic affective epistemology. Further, I chart Nova Safo's intersecting gestures of transitive embodiment—transnational, transgender, and transracial—by discussing the novel’s mournful evocation of three recently departed icons of fin-de-siècle literary culture: Oscar Wilde, Renée Vivien, and João da Cruz e Sousa.
Highlights
This study seeks to recover the novel Nova Safo (1912) by Visconde de Vila-Moura from the marginal status to which it has been consigned in Portuguese literary history by arguing for its momentous cultural relevance as Portugal’s first queer novel
Ganímedes (1906)—but it may be considered the inaugural exploration in this literary form of epistemic frameworks, affective energies, and creative horizons of an uncommonly diverse and inclusive queerness
O Barão de Lavos is readable as a cultural text that exceeds the limitations of its naturalist and violently homophobic design and can be placed, malgré lui, in the national genealogy of queer recognition and emancipation, the diametrically opposed, energetically homophilic intentionality of Nova Safo modulates the choral ensemble of the novel’s combined authorial and narrative agencies to produce an opus that, for all of its dissonant notes, is nothing less than a simultaneously mournful and aspirational hymn to queer possibility
Summary
This study seeks to recover the novel Nova Safo (1912) by Visconde de Vila-Moura from the marginal status to which it has been consigned in Portuguese literary history by arguing for its momentous cultural relevance as Portugal’s first queer novel.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
