This study seeks to recover the novel Nova Safo (1912) by Visconde de Vila-Moura from the marginal status to which it has been consigned in Portuguese literary history by arguing for its momentous cultural relevance as Portugal's first queer novel.

I argue that a mapping of this relationship allows, among other goals, for a reassessment (in terms akin to those of Vincent Sherry’s recent study, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence) of the commonplace assertion distancing the aesthetics and politics of decadentism from the form and content of the Modernist rupture in the Portuguese context.

This paper focuses in particular on what I claim is the relationship between Vila Moura’s creation and female-gendered configurations of perversion and creativity in the Portuguese Modernist canon, such as Orpheu’s Violante de Cysneiros, the 'americana fulva' of Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s Confissão de Lúcio, and José de Almada Negreiros’s A Engomadeira.

The largely forgotten novel Nova Sapho (1912), fictional debut of Visconde de Vila Moura (1877-1935), merits recovery from the oblivion is has been consigned to in canonical Portuguese literary history for a variety of reasons, not least among them the unprecedented (and unmatched even through the following century of Lusophone writing) figure of its protagonist, Maria Peregrina, an intellectually and sexually assertive lesbian and poet of genius.

Nova kin leviathan