Love in times of prose: mistaken passions in Eça’s short stories

Abstract

Eça de Queirós scarcely referred to the short story as genre. In the preface of his friend’s Conde de Arnoso, he defines the tale as an innocuous entertainment, a pause in the serious and ‘virile’ work of the literary form that really matters – the novel. And yet he cultivated with perfectionism the art of modern short story, providing an implicit poetics of the genre. One of his favourite themes is romantic love, seen as an obsessive, old-fashioned feeling. This explains his ambiguous loving characters, depicted with “light and sober drawing”. We intend to question the author’s strange vision of love and the relevance of this theme in his realist short fictions.