Introductory note.(Editorial)

With the publication of the current issue, Portuguese Studies completes the first stage in the redefinition of its identity as a journal which started with the re-launch under new editorship. With it we welcome the colleagues who accepted our invitation to form its new International Advisory Board and whose support and active participation we count upon to reach a wider pool of readers, contributors and referees, and a new generation of students. Richard Correll, our Editorial Assistant, also sees his role as in-house translator, prominently and indispensably on display in almost every article in this issue, formalized. Consolidating these developments, the journal will now move towards completion of the planned changes with an expansion of the editorial team and the introduction of a review section, as well as the occasional publication of guest-edited theme issues by which to better reflect the wide-ranging geographic, temporal and disciplinary scope of Lusophone Studies, a field itself changing beyond recognition.

In line with the changing function of the journal, we announced in Volume 21 the creation of an 'Archival' section for the publication of unknown, little-known, or hard-to-find texts; and we begin here with the publication of two archival texts, in translation, in the current issue. Antero de Quental's famous lecture of 1871 on the Causes of the Decline of the Peninsular Peoples in the Last Three Centuries is hardly a forgotten text; it remains one of the most cited and most read of nineteenth-century polemics, one that is at the heart of the intertext that informs the concerns of the Generation of 1870 with the marginality of Portugal in the Europe of its time and the Civilization of its day, which is to say, 'Modernity'. And yet, while it remains a founding text of the myths of Modernization in Portugal and of great interest to a comparative analysis of intellectual responses and the development of cultural sociology, it is virtually inaccessible to non-Portuguese readers. Its publication in English here will make available for undergraduate teaching courses a classic reference text in Portuguese literary and cultural history, and bring to the attention of scholars interested in the comparative analysis of nineteenth-century intellectuals a seminal text in the 'sociological' discussion of the relations between religion, the economy and development. Similarly, the publication here of Mario de Andrade's 1942 lecture on the Modernist Movement, reflecting on the making of ...