Abstract
The article discusses the premise behind binding literary value to the ability a work has to yield socio-historical information, prevalent in recent criticism on Machado de Assis. It argues that the body of Machado's work shows an increasing ambivalence regarding the links between imagined lives and history, thus proposing that in his late writings the matching between things real and things represented is a rhetorical and melancholy gesture of great insight. In order to illustrate the prevalence of moral imagination as object and technique in Machado's late novels, the author highlights a few points of contact between Machado de Assis and Henry James, contemporaries and akin in their literary sensibilities.
Highlights
The article discusses the premise behind binding literary value to the ability a work has to yield socio-historical information, prevalent in recent criticism on Machado de Assis
Throughout the twentieth century, and after the 1950s in Brazil, we have come to believe that the connection between narrative meaning and national life is central to understanding literary realism
Realism seems to yield truth making by means of including people, events, and relations that bear a considerable similarity with our world
Summary
The article discusses the premise behind binding literary value to the ability a work has to yield socio-historical information, prevalent in recent criticism on Machado de Assis. This is the case when critics assess works whose depiction of social and private http://machadodeassis.net/revista/numero13/rev_num13_artigo02.pdf
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