The Violent Maintenance of the Portuguese Colonial Identity and the Search for a Postcolonial one: literary images of Portugal as a colonial and postcolonial nation

Through the examination of Camões's Os Lusíadas , Sena's Os Grão-Capitães and Saramago's A Jangada de Pedra , this article explores violence as a means of shaping Portuguese identity in different historical contexts, and how these works portray the continued recourse to violence as Portugal moves from colonizing to postcolonial nation.

National Identity and National Unity in Contemporary East Timorese Literature

Beginning with a panoramic analysis of the role played by East Timorese poets in the struggle for liberation from Portuguese and Indonesian colonial rule, this article examines the extent to which an East Timorese national identity and unity repeatedly featured in the poetry of the 1970s and 80s are represented in contemporary Timorese literary production. By reading the work of the novelist Luís Cardoso, and the poets Abé Barreto and Celso Oliveira, the article also assesses whether the independent nation envisioned earlier by those such as Borja da Costa, Fernando Sylvan and Xanana Gusmão, has been realised. In doing so, critical attention is brought to bear on the intimate relationship between the specific material and political circumstances of East Timor and the literature produced in colonial and postcolonial moments in the nation’s history.

Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne

This monograph examines a selection of Vincent Bourne's Latin verse in its classical, neo-Latin and vernacular contexts, with particular attention to the theme of identity (and differing forms of identity). Its aim is to initiate the resurrection from silence of an author whose self-fashioning is achieved by investigating the identity of the self in relation to the other and by foregrounding multiple attempts to fashion other selves.

From Back Cover of published book:

Through close and perceptive analysis of Bourne's negotiation of poetic identity, Haan argues in new ways for the blend of classicism and Romanticism informing his marginalized status. As such, the book promises to revive scholarship on Bourne, and to be of use to students and scholars of Latin as well as vernacular verse.
Carla Mazzio, Professor of English, University of Chicago.


Estelle Haan is the UK's most eminent neo-Latinist. Her books with the APS on Milton (From Academia to Amicitia, Transactions 88, part 6) and Addison (Vergilius Redivivus, Transactions 95, part 2) are both important contributions to our knowledge of those authors, and their scholarship is presented in a way that accommodates the growing number of specialists who do not read Latin. Much of the content of this study is entirely new, and it is written in a way that will make it accessible to non-Latinists. The connections with English-language poets that Professor Haan adduces page after page will be a very considerable resource for students of vernacular poetry.
Gordon Campbell, Professor of Renaissance Literature, University of Leicester.


I have long thought that a modern study of Vincent Bourne was very much needed, and am greatly pleased that one has now been written. Estelle Haan offers a thoughtful and sensitive study that has remarkable depth. She capitalizes on the familiarity with other eighteenth-century English poets about whom she has previously written (Cowper, Gray, and most recently Addison) and she makes use of contempoary literary theory without becoming dependent on any single approach or disfiguring her writing with critical jargon. This work will, one hopes, provoke further research into Bourne and his poetry.
Dana F. Sutton, Professor Emeritus of Classics, The University of California, Irvine.