Machado de Assis, author of novels (1872-1873)

Abstract

 This article integrates a larger project that can be defined as the editorial history
of Machado de Assis’ consecration. It takes as its starting point the writer’s dedication to prose fiction from the mid-1860s onwards, as well as some of Machado de Assis’ critical ideas about the novel at the same time. A subject already explored by critics, what we intend to demonstrate with originality is that, alongside Machado’s critical and aesthetic choices, his desire to adopt, in the novel, an urban perspective and character study, is an action parallel to his knowledge of editorial and publishing practices, notably from his contact with the main publisher in Brazil at the time (B.-L. Garnier), which reverberated transnational actions. The idea of the “formation of the novelist” focuses on the search for an identity as a fiction author and on the search for space for a fiction that could provide him with international circulation, although, from our contemporary point of view, we know that these attempts were unsuccessful. In this way of reflection, and through the
analysis of documents, we evoke the active relations between Machado de Assis and Baptiste-Louis Garnier, especially in the years 1860-1870, as one of the accesses to the space of consecration progressively occupied by the writer, despite the tensions with his main editor. In this case, Machado de Assis is studied as an actor in the editorial inflection process that brought literary consequences to his career, as he had been working, until
then, as a critic, playwright, poet and chronicler (1850s and 1860s).