ABSTRACT

A. Lopes Mendes’ writing encapsulates the way in which tradition and modernity were conceived in Portugal in the late 19th-century. The imperial topic commands these discourses on modernity, namely when we focus on the debate that took place around the centuries-old imperial memory. In this essay, we analyse memory as discourse about an empire, bearing in mind the way authors deal with coeval epistemological and historical perspectives. This theoretical ground frames my conceptual proposal of A. Lopes Mendes’ writing in reports, biographic and descriptive memories. My aim is to unveil discoursive subtleties in several 19th-century writings, supported by the concepts of ethno-and ideo-landscapes that lied then at the core of the imagetic representation.