Jorge Miguel Bastos Da Silva, Ed. Utopias De Cordel E Textos Afins: Una Antologia (Book Review‪)‬

Jorge Miguel Bastos da Silva, ed. Utopias de Cordel e Textos Afins: una antologia. Vila Nova da Famalicao: Quasi, 2004. Biblioteca das Utopias, 1.8. 142 pp. $25.00 This anthology of utopian texts brings together for the first time eight Portuguese pamphlets of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the content and intention of which could be interpreted to varying degrees as utopian. The texts are supported by an excellent introductory essay in which the editor, Jorge Miguel Bastos da Silva, attempts to explain why contemporary Portugal--with a national psyche that is still firmly rooted in its proud history of global seafaring, discovery, and commerce, and with an artistic heritage that is exceptionally varied for a relatively small nation--has such an apparently small output of utopian literature. Bastos da Silva provides detailed commentaries and footnotes for each of the texts, in which their origins and utopian credentials are discussed. Such extensive contextualization is necessary not only to make the pamphlets as comprehensible as possible to the interested reader (even for those with a good command of Portuguese, this is not altogether an easy read), nor merely to put the category of utopian pamphlets more explicitly under the microscope, but to enable the resulting conclusions to be incorporated into the debate over the quantity, quality, and significance of Portugal's output of literary utopias. While the orthography of these texts has been brought up to date, they obviously still contain terminology--whether maritime, historical, ethnographic, or religious--that was current at the time of their publication.