THE PORTUGUESE PARADIGM IN MACHADO DE ASSIS’S DEFINITIONS OF ART

Abstract

The article addresses ideas that Machado de Assis formulated on art and literature in his set of texts of literary criticism and has three purposes: 1) to identify lines of continuity between the arguments of the writing from his youth and those presented in the three essays of the 1870s that consecrated him as a critic (“Instinto de nacionalidade”, “Literatura realista – O primo Basílio, romance do Sr. Eça de Queirós” and “A nova geração”); 2) to verify how the Luso-Brazilian tradition serves as a point of reference and beacon for the defining of his critical ideas and his literary production; and 3) to examine how his critical and theoretical conceptions relate with his poetic and fictional production. Therefore, what is being proposed is a reading of Machado de Assis’s critical ideas as a basis for a more integrative reading of his writings, in all of the genres in which he worked.