Along with The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro, Quincas Borba is one of Machado de Assis' major works and indeed one of the major works of nineteenth century fiction. With his uncannily postmodern sensibility, his delicious wit, and his keen insight into the political and social complexities of the Brazilian Empire, Machado opens a fascinating world to English speaking readers. When the mad philosopher Quincas Borba dies, he leaves to his friend Rubião the entirety of his wealth and property, with a single stipulation: Rubião must take care of Quincas Borba's dog, who is also named Quincas Borba, and who may indeed have assumed the soul of the dead philosopher. Flush with his newfound wealth, Rubião heads for Rio de Janeiro and plunges headlong into a world where fantasy and reality become increasingly difficult to keep separate. Brilliantly translated by Gregory Rabassa, Quincas Borba is a masterful satire not only on life in Imperial Brazil but the human condition itself.

A satirical tale of a young man flush with newfound wealth who promptly gets swindled, Quincas Borba is an inspired critique of nineteenth-century Brazil. Hailed in his lifetime as one of Latin America’s greatest writers, Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was a storyteller known for his wholly innovative narrative techniques and uncanny talent for unraveling the social and political milieu of nineteenth-century Brazil. These signature traits are on full display in Quincas Borba, a novel that sees Machado satirize a rapidly changing Rio de Janeiro. Originally published in 1891, the story begins with the death of its titular character, a mad philosopher infamous for spouting pessimistic theories of “Humanitism.” Borba leaves his fortune—including his dog, also named Quincas Borba—to Rubião, his loyal caretaker and a schoolteacher by trade. Bestowed with opulence beyond his wildest dreams, Rubião is quickly coaxed into the comforts of a rich man’s life—the only stipulation being that he continues to care for the canine Quincas Borba with the same dedication he once did the human. Adrift in the big, bad, bustling world of late-1860s Rio de Janeiro, it isn’t long before Rubião is targeted by the city’s sycophants, who can smell his naïveté from a mile away. Playfully told by an omniscient and possibly unreliable narrator, the novel is at once irreverent and ambitious, brimming with barbed wit and keen philosophical inquiry. Brilliantly translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson—the duo credited with introducing a new generation of readers to Machado through their translations of Dom Casmurro, The Collected Stories, and Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas—Quincas Borba is another strikingly modern tale from a blazing progenitor of twentieth-century fiction.

The great Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) published five of his nine novels as feuilletons in daily newspapers or fortnightly women's magazines. How were the structure and themes of those novels entangled with this serial-publication form? In da Silva's important new study, textual scholarship, critical theory and the history of the book are combined in order to trace this relationship. The most important case study is an extended consideration of Philosopher or Dog? (1891), the novel after which he abandoned the feuilleton. Through a comparison of the serial and book versions of Philosopher or Dog? and a thorough study of the periodical in which it appeared, the international women's magazine The Season , da Silva analyses the changes which the genre novel was undergoing at the end of the nineteenth century: the decline of the serial, and the standardisation of female press. Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva is Tutor of Portuguese at the University of Birmingham and Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Machado de Assis is among the most original creative minds in Brazil's rich, four-century-long literary tradition. Caldwell's critical and biographical study explores Machado's purpose, meaning, and artistic method in each of his nine novels, published between 1872 and 1908. She traces the ideas and recurrent themes, and identifies his affinities with other authors. In tracing Machado's experimentation with narrative techniques, Caldwell reveals the increasingly subtle use he made of point of view, sometimes indirect or reflected, sometimes multiple and "nested" like Chinese boxes. Caldwell shows the increasing sureness with which he individualized his characters, and how, in advance of his time, he developed action, not by realistic detail, but by the boldest use of allusion and symbol. Each novel is shown to be an artistic venture, and not in any sense a regurgitation from a sick soul as some critics have argued. IN searching out the unity of his novels, Caldwell explores the other aspects of Machado's intellectual life--as poet,journalist, playwright, conversationalist, and academician. Of particular interest is her attention to his shift away from the social criticism of his early novels into the labyrinth of individual psychology in the last five--all of which rank among the world literature. But this perceptive account never loses sight of the one element present in every piece of Machado's fiction, in eery one of his personages; that is, superlative comedy, in its whole range: wit, irony, satire, parody, burlesque, humor. Altogether, Caldwell reveals to us a writer, in essence a poet, who is still the altus prosator of Brazilian letters. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely regarded as Brazil’s greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-language examination of Machado since Helen Caldwell’s seminal 1970 study, K. David Jackson reveals Machado de Assis as an important world author, one of the inventors of literary modernism whose writings profoundly influenced some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century, including José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald Barthelme. Jackson introduces a hitherto unknown Machado de Assis to readers, illuminating the remarkable life, work, and legacy of the genius whom Susan Sontag called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” and whom Allen Ginsberg hailed as “another Kafka.” Philip Roth has said of him that “like Beckett, he is ironic about suffering.” And Harold Bloom has remarked of Machado that “he’s funny as hell.”

"Examines how racial identity and race relations are expressed in the writings of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), Brazil's foremost author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries"--Provided by publisher.