APONTAMENTOS SOBRE O IMPACTO DO CAMINHO DE SANTIAGO NO CAMPO EDITORIAL PORTUGUÊS DO SÉCULO XXI
Notes on the Impact of the Way of St James on Portuguese Publishing in the 21st Century

Author(s): Jorge Carril Espido, Serxio Couso Núñez
Subject(s): Cultural history, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Other Language Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Way of St James; Portuguese Way; Galician identity; Jacobean literature; travel literature
Summary/Abstract: Due to several autonomous decrees that have institutionalised the Compostela Holy Year since 1991, the Way of St James has recently become a social phenomenon of great significance in Galicia and abroad. This paper examines the impact of the Way on Portuguese publishing in the 21st century. Not only has Portugal strong historical and cultural ties with Galicia, but there has also been an increased interest in the promotion of the Way in this country (as evidenced by the Decree-law 51/2019 on “regulating the valorisation and promotion of the Way of St James through the certification of its itineraries”). Our analysis is based on the corpus available in the 'Bibliographic Database of Cultural Products about the Way of St James (1991–2023)' ("Base de Dados Bibliográfica de Produtos Culturais sobre os Caminhos de Santiago [1991–2023]"; http://caminhosdesantiago.net/), from which we extracted works published in Portugal between 1993 and 2021, i.e. one of the Compostela Holy Years and the high point of the promotion of the Way of St James. We analysed them in terms of chronology, authorship, publishers and textual typologies. Based on the results of our research - which include findings about the scarce number of renowned authors, the degree to which the Portuguese Way is present in these works, and the direct connection between the tourist interests and the type of works published by a given publisher - we show the slow (but existing) consolidation of the Way in the Portuguese editorial industry in the 21st century. We also prove that the Holy Years have contributed to the normalisation of this topic and describe how different textual genres have developed so far, placing a special emphasis on the narrative subgenres, as they show more clearly the imagery of the city of Compostela (and, by extension, Galicia) that is being disseminated. Finally, we also point out the possible impact that the culture of the Way of St James may have on another pilgrimage route - to the Shrine of Fatima. All of this enables us to trace the evolution and the panorama of Portuguese literature with a Jacobean theme in the first decades of the 21st century.

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