Literary historicism in Portugal was introduced by authors who had lived abroad in France, Germany or Spain. Two epic poems of Almeida Garrett, the great luminary of Portuguese Romanticism, mark its beginning; both were written during Garrett’s French and English exile in the mid-1820s. Camões (1825) documents the Romantic trend of thematizing great artists as worthy historical topics in their own right, and implicitly compares the condition of exile as experienced by both protagonist and author; the poem helped to lift the long-established canonicity of Portugal’s national poet into a mode of Romantic hero-worship. Dona Branca o A conquista dos Algarves (1826) evokes a love tragedy set during the 13th-century anti-Moorish Reconquista wars, and mixes that historical setting with elements of folklore, magic and superstition. This folkloric-medieval interest, inspired by Percy’s Reliques and Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, also informed Garrett’s verse romances, Adozinda and Bernal-francês (1828), which subsequently led to his benchmark ballad collection, the Cancioneiro (3 vols, 1843-51), mixing his own (re-)creations with authentic traditional material. Historical settings were used for his novel O Arco de Sant’Ana (2 vols, 1845-50) and for the dramas Um auto de Gil Vicente (1838) and O alfageme de Santarém (1842).

The most important successor to Garrett in the tradition of literary historicism was Alexandre Herculano, who, as adept of Michelet, saw it as his task to recall the past to life and to celebrate the continuity and essential character of the nation. He did so not only in his historical writing (Historia de Portugal, 1846-53; the German-inspired source-editions of Monumenta Portugaliae historica), but also in national-historical novels: O Bobo (“The court jester”, 1843; set during the 12th-century elevation of the County of Portugal into a sovereign kingdom) and Eurico, o Presbítero (1844; set in Visigothic times during the early Moorish conquests). Minor later representatives of literary historicism were the poet Feliciano de Castilho (1800–1875) and the novelist Camilo Castelo Branco (1825–1890).

In Castelo Branco’s work a shift to the genre of the rustic novel is noticeable, which would remain a topic of national reflection for the Realistic and Naturalistic generation, e.g. Eça de Queirós or Oliveira Martins. Their national commitment moved away from the Romantic register: it was oriented less towards a celebration of the past than towards a future modernization, which they hoped to achieve in a positivistic spirit, also in social and political activism.