A translation (from the original Portuguese) of the author's study of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839-1908). It focuses on Machado's "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas". It investigates how social structure gets internalized as literary form, arguing that Machado's style reveals the embedded class divisions of 19th-century Brazil.
"This is a masterpiece of criticism. The coherence of Schwarz's perspective and the clarity with which he elaborates the economic and cultural insights that form his dialectical approach to literature make his study a paradigmatic one for theoretical enterprise. By concentrating his interpretive talents on Machado's style, Schwarz also illuminates a question that has puzzled many present Machado readers: Why do we find him so satisfylingly contemporary?"--Leslie Damasceno, Duke University
