Katherine Vaz e a reinscrição de Mariana Alcoforado na História Literária

Abstract

This essay on Mariana – the book written by Katherine Vaz, a Luso-American novelist, based on the life of Mariana Alcoforado, and also a rereading of the well-known Portuguese Letters – attempts not only to unveil the net of relationships which may be established between this novel and other fictional works on the same character, written by women in Portugal during the twentieth century, but also to equate its several ways of revising traditional historiography, thus functioning as an example of what one might call "an ex-centric literature", to borrow Linda Hutcheon's formulation.