Call for Issue no. 58 - Letters, Readings, and Poetic Networks: Luso-Brazilian Correspondence in the Twentieth Century

Letters, Readings, and Poetic Networks: Luso-Brazilian Correspondence in the Twentieth Century
Guest Editors: Solange Fiuza (UFG/CNPq) and Ida Alves (UFF/CNPq)

Submission deadline: until December 31st, 2026

This dossier aims to bring together studies devoted to the correspondence between Brazilian and Portuguese poets and critics throughout the twentieth century, understanding the letter as a privileged space for aesthetic reflection, intellectual negotiation, and the construction of literary bonds between the two countries. More than mere biographical documents, this correspondence constitutes decisive archives for understanding the dynamics of the reading, circulation, and legitimation of poetry in Portuguese.

We are interested in examining how epistolary exchange between poets and critics contributes to revising the literary history of poetic relations between Brazil and Portugal in the twentieth century, shedding light on processes that often elude consolidated critical discourses and more stable historiographical narratives. Letters reveal debates in the making, provisional judgments, elective affinities, aesthetic disagreements, and strategies of positioning within the literary field, allowing for a more nuanced reading of these relations.

The dossier welcomes articles that address, among other aspects:

• correspondence between Brazilian and Portuguese poets and critics as a space for aesthetic, critical, and institutional dialogue;
• the role of letters in reassessing established interpretations of influences, affiliations, and ruptures between Brazilian and Portuguese poetry in the twentieth century;
• forms of mutual reading and evaluation of Brazilian and Portuguese poets expressed in letters exchanged directly or addressed to third parties (editors, critics, writers, cultural institutions);
• how correspondence records tensions, negotiations, and asymmetries in Luso-Brazilian literary relations;
• other aspects revealed by epistolary archives, such as networks of intellectual sociability, the circulation of books and journals, critical mediation, editorial projects, censorship, exile, friendship, and literary rivalry.

By privileging approaches that bring together textual analysis, genetic criticism, literary history, and archival studies, this dossier seeks to contribute to a more complex understanding of poetic relations between Brazil and Portugal, highlighting the role of correspondence in the construction and reconfiguration of the Portuguese-language literary field in the twentieth century.