Editorial data

Seara Nova’s editorial history, for the years between 1921 and 1984, is not only very extensive but also unusually complex, particularly because of the obstacles the magazine had to overcome during Salazar’s and Caetano’s dictatorship, to which it showed firm opposition.

After 1927, the most noteworthy seareiros were forced into exile, imprisoned, and even banished; in the same period, state censors began rejecting and mutilating submitted print proofs, forcing rewrites of every issue, or even sometimes outright banning them; an economic asphyxia continuously hovered over the magazine’s viability, leading to internal tensions and rifts between the partners and the staff, who, on more than one occasion, declared an intent to shut down the periodical.

Such a long and turbulent path inevitably had an impact on the magazine, which started out as a biweekly publication with a print run of 8000 copies and a socially and politically ample readership, from anarchists to fascists. With the Dictatorship, Seara became a periodical that gradually adapted to adversity: the editorial staff often changed; its doctrinarian or literary nature frequently shifted; its periodicity was irregular, occasionally going on long hiatuses; the number of pages in each issue varied significantly; the constellations of influential authors were steadily reconfigured.

Faced with these circumstances, recording and analysing – even summarily – the editorial history of the magazine is not compatible with a simple presentation text for websites such as those found in the Revistas de Ideias e Cultura portal.

We would rather present a general note and, fundamentally, to direct readers to Daniel Pires’ dictionary entry, where the essential editorial data on Seara Nova can be found throughout its more than one-hundred pages.

The remark intends to highlight the perseverance of many of the early seareiros, a group in which Luís da Câmara Reys, who effectively ran the magazine for nearly four decades, stands out. Augusto Casimiro, who took over these administrative functions after Reys’ death during the 1960 electoral campaign, confirms the fidelity to a common enterprise that spanned entire lifetimes; the same can be said of Jaime Cortesão and other outstanding cultural figures who, after gaining some distance to the magazine for a period of time, never failed to return to its pages.

The reasons for referring readers to Daniel Pires’ entry are twofold. On one hand, it is the most complete study of Seara Nova’s editorial course; on the other, it contains and underlines all the factual and contextual elements that define the standard used for all Revistas de Ideias e Cultura websites (see Daniel Pires, Dicionário da Imprensa Periódica Literária Portuguesa do Século XX (1941-1974), Lisboa, Grifo, 2000, vol. II, part 2, pp. 430-535).

Luís Andrade