Description: This book makes the argument that Machado de Assis, widely hailed as one of Brazil's greatest writers, was also a major theoretician of the modern novel form. Steeped in great works of Western literature and an imaginative reader of French Symbolist poetry, Machado creates a "new narrative," one that will presage the groundbreaking theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure by showing how even the language of narrative cannot escape being elusive and ambiguous in terms of meaning.
Review Quotes: "Earl E. Fitz advances the question of language as key to innovation and modernity in the mature works of Machado de Assis. Fitz attributes his departure from realism to a new awareness of the mutability, instability, self-referentiality and inescapable ambiguity of language in relation to meaning. What the novels are really about is not what they seem." --K. David Jackson "Yale University"