"This study describes and analyzes cultural and literary mythology surrounding the figure of the seventeenth-century nun Mariana Alcoforado as the presumed author of the celebrated collection of love letters that originally appeared in 1669 in French under the title of Lettres portugaises (known in their many English editions as Portuguese Letters or Letters of a Portuguese Nun). Ostensibly written by a nun cloistered in a provincial Portuguese convent to her departed lover, an officer in the French army, they are nowadays generally reputed to have been a literary fake authored by a seventeenth-century French writer." "The Portuguese Nun describes the foundation and development of the myth of Soror Mariana and illuminates its continuing investment in the fabrication, by the country's cultural elite, of a shared national imagination. It examines the process of national reappropriation of the text from the Romantic period until its latest, postmodern manifestations exemplified most remarkably by the feminist manifesto Novas Cartas Portuguesas [New Portuguese Letters]. From its first "retranslations" into Portuguese in the early nineteenth century, this slim collection of five love letters has retained its status of a somewhat improbable textual support for one of Portugal's most persistently cultivated cultural fictions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This comparative analysis of the foreign policies of European Union member states includes comprehensive coverage of the post-Maastricht period and the three newest members of the EU. In the only comparative study of its kind since 1976, the book analyzes the dual impact of the Maastricht Treaty on the European Union, and the post-Cold War environment on the foreign policy processes of the EU’s member states. The book argues for a new approach to the foreign policy analysis of EU states that recognizes the fundamental changes that membership brings after the Cold War, but also acknowledges the diverse role of policies which states seek to retain or advance as being “special.”

This book seeks to offer a better understanding of the strategic responses to Brexit from ten small European Union (EU) member states: Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal and Slovakia. Inspired in an intersection of different streams of research, it examines the extent and the ways Brexit has impacted these countries, analysing their coping strategies to deal with the challenges raised by such a disruptive development, as well as considering the implications of their reactions to Brexit for patterns of national foreign policy Europeanization. In so doing, this volume enhances the comprehension of smaller EU member states’ foreign and security policies, offering a systematic and comparative analysis of how political and diplomatic elites in ten countries positioned themselves domestically and within the EU vis-à-vis the Brexit process. A combination of conceptual insights, valuable empirical accounts and updated knowledge on contemporary issues from such interesting set of case studies provides room for debate on the comparability of the way(s) in which different small countries have approached their Brexit strategies. All these aspects are explored with respect to states that have been relatively neglected and underexplored in the small states literature. This edited volume will be of great value to upper-level students, academics, and researchers interested in European politics, foreign policy and international relations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

The only complete political biography by a major Portuguese historian.