Este estudo investiga a personificação da morte como um dos grandes elementos de ruptura entre a literatura portuguesa tradicional e a contemporânea e como subsídio para reflexão acerca da realidade pós-moderna portuguesa. Diante de uma tradição estagnada em torno do lirismo, surgem produções artísticas que buscaram matéria literária no imaginário europeu para desenvolver uma literatura de cunho crítico. A importância do imaginário da morte medieval como referência cultural é comprovada através da gama de iconografias e de textos escritos encontrados ao longo dos tempos, inclusive na contemporaneidade e na preservação de festas populares ainda no século 21. Seguindo essa tendência, a personificação da morte é o elemento central desenvolvido no romance de José Saramago As intermitências da morte, e de Augusto Abelaira O triunfo da morte, literatura pós-74, como via para renovação literária e exercício crítico da sociedade. Também é através da figura da morte que são desenvolvidos três conceitos pós-modernos: ruptura entre ficção e realidade, paródia e ironia. Essas abordagens são trabalhadas a partir da teoria de Käte Hamburger e Linda Hutcheon, entre outros, em função da possibilidade de unir o tema da morte e a teoria pós-moderna no percurso teórico específico definido neste estudo. / This study investigates the death personification as one of the great elements of rupture between the Portuguese Traditional Literature and the Contemporary Literature as a subsidy for reflection on the Portuguese post-modern reality. Facing a stagnant tradition around the lyric, artistic productions appear which searched literary subject from the European imaginary to develop a literature on a critical way. The importance of the imaginary of medieval death as a cultural reference is proved through a great deal of iconographies and from written texts found along the ages also in the contemporaneity and in the preservation of popular parties and feasts still in the 21st century. Following this tendency, the death personification is the central element developed in the novel by José Saramago As intermitências da morte, and by Augusto Abelaira O Triunfo da morte, literature post-74, seen as a way to literature renovation as well as a critical society exercise. It is also through the death figure that three post-modern concepts are developed: rupture between fiction and reality, parody and irony. These approaches are worked and developed from the theory by Käte Hamburger and Linda Hutcheon, among others, because of the possibility of uniting the death theme and the post-modern theory on the theory specific course defined in this study.

Jesus' story has been retold in various forms and fashions for centuries. Jesus novels, a subset of the historical fiction genre, are one of the latest means of not only re-imagining the man from Galilee but also of rewriting the canonical Gospels. This thesis explores the Christological portraits constructed in four of those novels while also using the novels to examine the intertextual play of these Gospel rewrites with their Gospel progenitors. Chapter 1 offers a prolegomenon to the act of fictionalizing Jesus that discusses the relationship between the person and his portraits and the hermeneutical circle created by these texts as they both rewrite the Gospels and stimulate a rereading of them. It also establishes the "preposterous" methodology that will be used when reexamining the Gospels "post" reading the novels. Chapters 2 to 5 offer four case studies of "complementing" and "competing" novels and the techniques they use to achieve these aims: Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt; Neil Boyd's The Hidden Years; Nino Ricci's Testament; and José Saramago's The Gospel according to Jesus Christ. Chapter 6 begins an examination of a specific interpretive circle based upon Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. Beginning with the synoptic accounts of that event, the chapter then turns to how Jesus' testing has been reinterpreted and presented in two of the novels. Returning to the Gospel of Matthew's version of the Temptation, chapter 7 offers a "preposterous" examination of that pericope, which asks novel questions of the text and its role with Matthew's narrative context based on issues raised by the Gospel rewrites. The thesis concludes by suggesting that Jesus novels, already important examples of the reception history of the Gospels, can also play a helpful role in re-interpreting the Gospels themselves.