Machado de Assis: towards a poetics of emulation

In this book, João Cezar de Castro Rocha, one of Machado's leading scholars, explores the poetics of emulation in Machado de Assis—the technique of using previous authors—in the case of Machado, Pascal, Xavier de Maistre, Shakespeare, the Bible, Stendhal, Poe, Baudelaire, and José de Alencar, among countless others—as writing models for creating new works. João Cezar demonstrates that these connections to earlier works do not demonstrate, in Machado's work, a sign of cultural subservience, but rather problematize the dissymmetrical relationship between European centers and former colonies.