ABSTRACT
Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros is Portugal’s best known and most translated novelist of the nineteenth century. The Maias, though considered less of an ideologically driven work, because of the lack of a clear moral lesson, has, nonetheless, still been read as a thesis novel representing, through three generations of the Maia clan, all of nineteenth-century Portugal. This chapter focuses on The Relic, by far Eca’s most read and most critically acclaimed novel in the English language, a work that expresses a clear break with the Realist/Naturalist way of writing fiction. It shows that other aesthetic changes, which can be designated as “aesthetics of imperfection” inform and structure the narrative of The Relic. The chapter analyzes a few of Eca’s letters and essays of this period that suggest an author quite conscious of a new aesthetics informing his work.
