ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to locate the importance of Portugal's outstanding modernist poet and writer Fernando Pessoa in both a European and an international tradition. It assesses Pessoa within the context of the German philosophical tradition, examining the figure and function of the minor heteronym Antonio Mora within Pessoa's drama-em-gente as a player in a game of contrasting philosophical attitudes. The book addresses the question of Pessoa's place in the Portuguese literary canon from the unusual angle of the writer's insertion of his various 'proper' and 'other' selves in a supposed Portuguese literary tradition, which he constantly reconfigured via significant exclusions, rearrangements and incorporations. It attempts to ensure his own place in the literary firmament by tracing his self-acknowledged debt to William Shakespeare through the lens of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century diagnoses of hysteria and neurasthenia, recalling Pessoa's famous self-diagnosis as a 'histerico-neurastenico'.
