ABSTRACT
The literary production of Machado de Assis spans the last stages of the Brazilian Romantic movement and the emergence in Brazil, in the wake of analogous earlier developments in Europe, of the Realist “New Idea.” In his works he was responsible both for divulging and questioning this new approach in a tantalizing manner. Machado both engages with and to a large extent questions the central tenets of Realism, including the optimistic notion of the possibility of an accessible truth as upheld by Positivism. His writing spans most of the literary genres but excels in particular in the sphere of the novel and short story.
