ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the most part from contexts that remain peripheral to the canonical mainstream, drawing in particular from Viennese modernism as a term of comparison. The canonical, Eurocentric centre/periphery model of modernist internationalism is being thereby questioned from the perspective of a transnational model that emphasizes the heterogeneity of 'a constantly hybridized phenomenon' which 'travels, translates, transplants, and indigenizes — globally, and not from a single point of origin'. It may well be that sensationism, no doubt one of the major expressions of what could be called a post-symbolist condition, is, as a poetic programme fully developed in the terms of Fernando Pessoa's theory and practice, 'an exclusively Portuguese literary current'. In a way very much akin to Pessoa's 'fingimento', art, then, becomes the site of a purely fictional play, whose sole meaning, in the sense later codified by Clive Bell, lies in the search for significant form as the source of emotions that are nothing but aesthetic.
