Book Description

"'Portuguese Ulyssism' (Gilberto Freyre's concept referring to Luís Vaz de Camões's epic and the Portuguese maritime voyage in the Renaissance) is an axial cultural construct, which this work partially absorbs but also departs from, to assert mutating literary experiences referring to the Camonean version of the myth in the epic Os Lusíadas/The Lusiads. Vaz de Camões's epic describes Vasco da Gama's voyage to India and his encounters with numerous obstacles and hardships in the New World, thus relocating Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey, and, in particular, Virgil's The Aeneid. In it, the myth of Ulysses combines with the subject of Portuguese colonial dispersal throughout the world in the Renaissance to form the focus of Camões's epic, whose characters are split into two archetypes: Ulysses - nationals with diasporic identities - and the Old Man of Restelo, who represents the arguments of the settled identities of the nation against the ambitions of a Portuguese global diaspora. This research revisits the Camonean dialogue with Homer and Virgil in the context of the Portuguese colonial dispersal in the Renaissance to suggest a postcolonial Ulysses in the Lusophone world"--