The Portuguese literary works published after the Carnation Revolution (April 25th, 1974) will overcome the obstacles to which, previously, censorship had consigned it. The purpose of this article is to determine the features of the artistic-discursive practice of Lidia Jorge in depicting Portuguese society during the period of the fascist dictatorship in the country. The subject of analysis is the author’s creative techniques that develop socio-aesthetic discourse in the Portuguese fiction. Authors will then beginning a creative process, questioning, reflecting and reviving the country’s recent memories, through the exhumation of these memories and strating a critical reflection on the 48 years of dictatorship (1928–1974). Based on the creative experience provided by the Carnation Revolution, we propose to follow the literary artistic discourse that Lídia Jorge, in her work The Day of the Prodigies, carries out on the rural Portuguese southern country, as well as the creative aesthetic process that, using fictional modalizations of the magic realism and the marvelous, allegorizes the contemporary Portuguese reality of the narrative’s writing time. The analysis of this socio-artistic (social-aesthetic) discourse used by Lídia Jorge will be based on the theoretical-methodological assumption that considers the act of writing as a material force that occurs in a certain place — and in a certain historical situation — being thus affiliated to several institutions and establishing a system of relationships with other social praxis. After the analysis of the artistic discourse of Lídia Jorge we can eventually conclude that this author will demystify colonialist, imperialist and heroic mythologies and will thus reveal the chronic backwardness to which Portuguese fascism had condemend Portugal, both in technological and social terms.
Ana Saldanha (2025) studied this question.