To feel all things in every way : Portuguese literary dialogues with European avant-gardes

To Feel All Things in Every Way advances the understanding of overlooked relationships between Portuguese modernist writers and the European avant-garde moment, primarily expressed in Futurism and Cubism.

Authors Fernando Pessoa, Mrio de S-Carneiro, and Raul Leal sought in their aesthetic reflections to affirm the exceptionality of Portuguese Letters, often by distancing themselves from the orthodoxy of the avant-garde movements and even deriding their leaders.

However, their own writings and praxis as a literary group illustrate clear affinities with and direct influences from the new aesthetic languages of a rapidly changing world, in which speed, instant global communication, and technological achievement featured prominently.

Often reluctantly, they were motivated by the ideas of critics and creators, from Guillaume Apollinaire to F.

T. Marinetti, from Pablo Picasso to Arthur Cravan. Cosmopolitan, spellbound by a global vision of the world, but aware that the Portuguese worldview they had inherited was becoming ever more restricting, early twentieth-century Portuguese modernists were motivated by avant-garde proclamations, public commotion, radically new forms of visual representation and literary expression, and ultimately by questioning the limits of the notion of art.

Portuguese Literary Dialogues with European Avant-gardes addresses Mrio S-Carneiros response to Cubism; the First World War experience and Futurism; as well as Pessoas use of the concept and practice of artistic blague and the works by his heteronym lvaro de Campos.

Eagerly awaited by scholars, the author presents Raul Leals project of regenerating Marinettian Futurism, and reveals for the first time Leals extensive correspondence with Marinetti where discussion focuses also on Portuguese national identity: as Leal says, Portugal is the country of the Past and also of the Future, but the Present deeply overwhelms her.

Includes 20 unpublished facsimile documents from Pessoa, S-Carneiro and Leal.