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Introduction

Socio-literary approach to the book «TUA» COLECTÂNEA LITERÁRIA: Memórias do Vale e da Linha Férrea, of the FozTua Project, which is presented and whose reception we intend to broaden
Texts by various authors, both classic and anonymous (novels, poetry, short stories, popular literature, news columns), illustrate the action of/in the history of individuals and populations in relation with the Tua Valley, River, line and train, during more than 100 years.
Narratives, characters, events and episodes in various time spaces make up the set of literary fictions that provide an approximate and sensitive vision of the Tua Valley realities around the construction, operation and closing of the railway line.
Memories, identities, historical contexts where percepts, affects and social representations operate under various logics or social worlds that illustrate, by the fictional production of na imaginary realism, the socio-historical meaning of the Tua Valley and line, enchanting readers.
The interdisciplinary analysis made is developed in the socio-historical framework (M.Block), the “sociology of action” (Thévenot e Boltanski), the theory of social representations (Durkheim) and literature theory (Todorov) and aims to open other avenues of academic research on this topic.

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�Tua line- Brunheda

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�1. A first approach to“TUA” Colectânea literária�

1.1.Content and order

All texts are in Portuguese, the 5th most spoken language in the world, with about two hundred and eighty million speakers, therefore it is intended for a vast and diversified public.
This anthology, a multi-perpective discursive construction of the literary memory of the Tua Valley and Line, demonstrates a socio-cultural, “natural” and technical, historical and spatio-temporally anchored object.
The literary corpus, varied in themes, genres, authors and contextual dimensions represented, insert us into disparate and impressive environments and in a symbolic universe of great literary, aesthetic and sensitive richness.
Translates the historical, social, literary and cultural contexualization of the Tua Valley and line, and provides a constellation of readings likely to refer to the present and geneology of the object, literarily represented.
The order and presentation of the literary compositions follows a chronological thread (author and temporality of his argument), organizational structure to which the indexes composed of genre classifications, authors and titles refer.

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1.2. Objectives

The anthology is na incentive for investigative, educational and cultural development of various audiences, which reinforces it as a social and cultural asset.

In the field of research, it promotes the renovation of the genre by opening to non-dichtotomous focuses of history, language and literature and contributes to new projects that enrichen knowledge and the literary, cultural and historical debate on the Tua Valley and line.
In the area of education, which among us registers a great lack of literary anthologies for young adults and adults in the training process of readers, it emerges as an incentive for a policy of learning throughout life, since it:� -promotes literary texts for various interests and tastes; � -all of them have in common the references and distinctive traits of the Tua Valley, River, line and train, riverside villages and populations, multiple lifes and condensed emotions;� -each reader can easily understand which author or writing genre he or she prefers, although such preferences change with time and with what one reads.

Its reading allows us to understand that literature, the art of the word, can present itself in many and various forms; if it were always the same, it would not be an art.

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�2.Literary fictions and social representations: Tua Valley and line�

2.1.Reading perspective

The “telling” of a past and a presente transformed by the sociotechnical, reinvented by fictional materiality that allows us to know various economic, social and cultural meanings of the history of the Tua Valley, of a regional mark, its local geographic harmony and its projection on a horizon that surpasses the local scale and approaches the translocal scale.
The literary fictions, reconstructions imagined from life experiences, memories and imaginations, under percepts and affects, in its diachronic observation, “portray” movements of people, goods and services, recurrent emigration, historical events, methods of day-to-day work and leisure, or even plagues and diseases like pneumonia and the Spanish flu, local enterprises...
The characters and social contexts they are a part of and the narrative plot establish dynamic and dialectical relations between them that are characteristic of the social representations* used by individuals, through gestores and words and built on the meeting of the singular/collective, with mutual exchanges between natural, social and cultural environments.
* Social representations, symbolic elements, system of interpretation of reality, of polymoprhic composition, are a set of concepts, propositions and explanations originating in daily life in the course of interpersonal communciation (Moscovici,2003), “miniature behaciors” (Leontiev, 1978). They are taken as folk wisdom, myths, beliefs, condensed from memories and multiple expressions of identities, convergent and contradictory, that come together in a common sense and that are historically and socially shared.

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2.2. Contextual analysis of social representations

From the social representations here inventories we can notice: the force of the social system that organized habits, interiorized changes and readaptations; rules of operation and organizaion of social and cultural life, values and the cultures of places.
two nuclear sets of social representations – the whistle of the Tua train, iron horse, on the railway and the opening of the mountains’ arms = nature built by society and technology, anthropormorphized:
watching the train pass by, “chug chug”, slow, damn carelessness, acrobat that takes first loves to the militar, to emigration, new and old Trás-os-Montes wanderings from absence, distancing, loss, curse/ inhospitable character of the region / material improvements of the province / reduce interiorities / to open the way, among rocks and ravines, biblical epic / dynamite / politicall struggles / the zigzag of the macadam / “steep river banks of grandiose proportions”/ great landowners and English Port wine merchants / perched Trás-os-Montes villages, similar to luso-roman hamlets / modern technology, engineering construction and steam engine railways / handles, valves, levers and carriages / the puf of smoke and steam / the fascinating engine of that train creaking iron /pneumonia and mortality / fugitive landscapes / cliffs and ravines/ constant rumble of the river /the Tua line like the Swiss or French Alps ways / figures of solitary elderly and world travelling teachers/ pendular lives of people by the minute / womb of strange fragrances / engrossed passengers/ 3rd class carriages / beauty of Trás-os-Montes, brief stops, wishes of safe travel/ diachronic perception of time / etc.

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3. Logics or social worlds: another perspective of analysis

Domestic logic	Industrial logic	Market logic	Inspiration logic	Civiv logic
Farms and the absent farmowner	The train as the iron horse and beautiful iron monster	Traina nd railway, means and connection route	Literary fictions	Denunciation of the line’s closure and the “night of theft” of the engines
Agriculture in the Tua Valley, toil of agricultural land	Construction of the Tua line	Transportation of people and goods	Poetic writing	Defense of a world of values and of natural and historical heritage
Relation between railway and local populations	Railway workers	Controversial debates around the opening of the line	Percepts and affects	Abandoned stops and closed stations
Local rural practices, uses and customs	Whistle of the train and the noise of the rails	Mobility and emigration	Literary plots	Controvery surround the construction of the dam
River ferries	Steam engine, locomotives, handles, levers	Transportation of agricultural products and goods	Erudite and mythological perceptions	Uproar and social revolt Scuffles
Hospitality of local populations and socialization	Idea of progresso and regional development	English Port wine merchants	Diachronic perception of time	Official opening of the line, constuction and progresso of a region.
Beliefs and superstiations (the devil…)	Explosive force of dynamite	Highly competetive environment of wine and spirits	Mountains’ open arms. Womb of strange frangrances.	Right to the continuity of life of the Tua Valley populations

Table 1 – Worlds or social logics

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This theoretical and heterogenous coordination framework was built to face problems and questions derived from the plural use of micro and macro scales and the necessity of integration between action and structure.
This final categorization of social representions tends to an intelligible reading of the complex and hybrid empirical reality and allows us to approach this regional case and other national cases at an interpretive and explanatory level.
It is marked by a regime of pluri-activity derived from the simultaneous presence of small agriculture and spaces technologized by the railway and train.

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�Final thoughts�

Turning to literature, we end metaphorically, with the recommendation If you go to Tua, Forget about possessive pronouns and this warning, written in Foz-Tua sixty years ago: Progress still leaves many stones in its way!
The polyphonic memories that narrate life experiences and social and cultural impacts of the historical technical enterprise that was the Tua line in Trás-os-Montes, a factor of transformation in the way of life of small and inland rural communities, are presented here in a documental and fictional literary corpus that sends us into history.
The “local color” and “permanence of nature” are here a common feature and bridge for dialogue between the writer and the social historian, revealing two different forms of knowledge in the same object.
Fiction must be regulated by the documentation, by the extra-narrative reference to reach the truth.
Mediation between what can be fictionalized and the constitution of the story itself passes through the hands of imagination, which enables the representation of both history and literature, to read the sources available, reconstruct the past and place what’s missing in front of the reader.
This is however, a whole other development of this discussion that does not fit here.

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