- 320 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
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.”
K. David Jackson is professor of Portuguese and director of undergraduate studies of Portuguese at Yale University. He lives in Woodbridge, CT.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part 1: The Literary World of Machado de Assis
- 1. The Wizard of Cosme Velho
- 2. The Formative Period
- 3. Novels of the 1870s
- 4. The Literary Modernism of Machado de Assis
- Part 2: Reading Machado de Assis
- 5. Machado’s Pendulum
- 6. Breaking the Frame: The Rhetoric of Substitution
- 7. Machado’s World Library
- 8. Time’s Invisible Fabric: Telling What Cannot Be Said, Saying What Cannot Be Told
- Part 3: Three Exemplary Modes
- 9. Theater and Opera: Machado’s Operatic Theater of the World
- 10. Delirium, Hallucination, and Dream: Flying Through Time on a Delirious Trapeze
- 11. Humanitas and Satire: Machado’s Mad Philosopher
- Part 3: The Actor-Authors
- 12. Brás Cubas, Basso Buff
- 13. Bento Santiago’s Grand Dissimulation
- 14. The Love-Death Theme of Counselor Ayres
- Part 3: Conclusion
- 15. Machado and the Spectacle of the World
- Notes
- A Note on Sources
- Credits
- Index