Machado and the Cost of Reading

Abstract

Abstract: This essay studies Machado de Assis’ relations with the technical and economic foundations of literary production in nineteenth-century Brazil, which seem to have been abundant and diverse, leaving marks both inside and outside of his fiction. It will be argued that Machado de Assis is much more attentive (and submissive) to the misty, complex, and asymmetric world in which, in nineteenth-century Brazil, not only narrators and male and female readers but also writers and editors exchanged flips and bows.