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Article: Portuguese literature
- Article from:
- The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition
CopyrightThe Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2008 Columbia University Press. (Hide copyright information)
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Portuguese literature writings in Portuguese. The literature of Brazil is considered separately (see
Brazilian literature
).
Early Works
Literature in the Portuguese language first emerged in lyric poetry, the courtly love poems collected in
cancioneiros
[song books]. The earliest of these, three in number, are the
Cancioneiro da Ajuda, da Vaticana,
and
Colocci-Brancuti,
written in the 13th cent. In the early 20th cent. the scholarly work of Carolina
Micaëlis de Vasconcelos
on the
Cancioneiro da Ajuda
opened large vistas into the past of Portuguese literature. The early poems were greatly influenced by the Provençal language and literature, but they had the ...