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.”

For those who study literature, Machado de Assis, the Brazilian Pyrrhonian provides a foundation for understanding one of the most important writers of the Americas. For philosophers, the book reveals a fascinating worldview, thoroughly rooted in the traditions of ancient skepticism.

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.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) never left Brazil and rarely traveled outside his native city of Rio de Janeiro, yet he is widely acknowledged by those who have read him as one of the major authors of the nineteenth century. His works are full of subtle irony, relentless psychological insights, and brilliant literary innovations. Yet, because he wrote in Portuguese, a language outside the mainstream of Western culture, those with access to his writings are relatively few. This book is designed not only to call new attention to this master but also to raise questions about the nature of literature itself and current alternative views on how it can be approached. Four essays address the question of Machado's "realism" in the five masterpiece novels of his maturity, especially Dom Casmurro. The noted contributors include John Gledson (University of Liverpool), João Adolfo Hansen (Universidade de São Paulo), Sidney Chalhoub (Universidade de Campinas), and Daphne Patai (University of Massachusetts at Amherst). Dain Borges of the University of California at San Diego says, "[This is the] only collection explicitly debating the question that polarizes contemporary Brazilian criticism of Machado de Assis: was he a sophisticated late realist, or was he a pioneering anti-realist, even a postmodernist? The [essayists] marshal their evidence and argument with virtuosity and arrive at sharply opposing conclusions."