Returned or uprooted? An analysis of the linguistic representaion of the social tension in the romance O Retorno
2016
Abstract
The romance O Retorno by Dulce Maria Cardoso is dedicated to the social turbulence in Portugal in the middle of the 1970's. Hundreds of thousand Portuguese people who had spent a big part of their lives in Africa had to, all of a sudden, leave behind everything they had and "return", being received suspiciously or even deprecatively.
The paper deals with the linguistic means the author uses to express, openly or less openly, the conflict between the returned - uprooted ones, and the majority of the Portuguese society.