This article explores the relationships between the Portuguese surrealist movement and the fictional phenomenon that is analysed by Eduardo Lourenço in “Uma Literatura Desenvolta ou os Filhos de Álvaro de Campos” (1966). Following a brief presentation of the type of critique that defines what Lourenço calls “uninhibited literature”, I discuss an essay by Nelly Novaes Coelho and a lecture by Maria Lúcia Lepecki on the importance of surrealism in the transformations of subsequent narrative prose. In “Psicanálise Mítica do Destino Português” (1978), Lourenço revisits the idea of uninhibited literature, incorporating an element that was absent in the 1966 essay – which is surrealism. The movement led by Mário Cesariny and António Maria Lisboa is now presented as fundamental in the process of subverting national images and in reestablishing the modernist tradition that paved the way for the emergence of new fiction in the 1950s and 1960s.
