ABSTRACT
The Brazilian writer, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, one of the greatest Latin American authors, is not unknown in the English-speaking world. Quincas Borba is one of Machado de Assis's greatest novels and the one with the most problematic creative process. The job of surveying of Quincas Borba in A Estacao, carried out by the Machado de Assis Committee, was especially difficult due to the lack of order in the numbering and the absence of a connecting link. In the voluminous literature which has been published on Machado de Assis, the two versions of Quincas Borba could hardly have passed unnoticed, but the fundamental artistic innovation represented by this novel has received very little attention in its critical history. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.
