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This essay closely examines the role played by the Crimean War in Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's 1900 novel Dom Casmurro. In portraying the narrator of the novel, Bento Santiago, nicknamed "Casmurro," and his boyhood friend, Manduca, as quarreling over their preference in the 1854-56 conflict between Russia and an Anglo-French-Ottoman coalition, Machado delineates certain character traits in the two friends, differentiating the sympathetic Manduca, doomed or die young, and the dour, longer-lasting Casmurro. But Machado also comments on the global reach of the Crimean War (in which Brazil was neutral) and of the global canvas on which a Brazilian novelist of this era inevitably drew. Though the world was not as well-connected as it is today, these reverberations allow us to speak of a developing semi-global environment in the mid-nineteenth century. Given Machado's own racial background, and the persistence of slavery and colonialism worldwide, examining the Crimean War reference in the novel can speak both to the narrative strategies within Dom Casmurro and to the novel's wider sociopolitical applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the paradoxical relation of the literary work of the Brazilian author João Guimarães Rosa to the field of world literature. On the one hand, this work is distinguished by an insistent worlding function, insofar as it is a prime example of a regionalist modernism that transcends its local and regionally specific context into universal, global, and metaphysical dimensions of meaning. On the other hand, the author has created a virtually unique linguistic idiom that requires heightened concentration on the part of the reader and poses enormous challenges for translation. The article argues that this paradox may be usefully discussed by way of the category of the vernacular, as it derives from Dante's treatise De vulgari eloquentia. The vernacular reshaping of the language emphasises the mutability of the world and the striving of the literary discourse to reconnect itself to some sense of poetic immediacy. Matters of linguistic resistance and self-conscious, meta-linguistic or meta-translational passages will be analysed insofar as they serve the literary exhibition of the vernacular as something that courts yet is already removed from oral/popular immediacy. Comments on a long novella (O recado do morro) and an epic novel (Grande Sertão: Veredas), both from 1956, explore the relation between the word, the vernacular, and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that traditional division of J. M. Machado's works into two distinct phases is not universally emphasized, lingering orthodoxy relegates Helena to the pile of aesthetic disappointments that mar the early career of Brazil's foremost novelist. It mentions that professor Joshua Landy, has argued that certain works of fiction are best understood as formative, in the sense that they offer opportunities for readers to engage in specific kinds of intellectual or mental training.

This paper aims to investigate contemporary literature's dynamics in Brazil by looking into spatial practices within the novels A chave da casa (2007), by Tatiana Salem Levy, and A maçã envenenada (2013), by Michel Laub. Both authors -- award-winning contemporary Brazilian novelists, marked by Jewish roots, and connected to different spatialities during their lives -- are concerned with time and space movements alongside identity and memory within their literary experimentation processes. Thus, this paper analyses the dialogue between these selected works regarding space and time representation in order to understand their connections to the construction of identity. As a theoretical basis, Mikhail Bakhtin's, Gilles Deleuze's, and Zigmunt Bauman's thoughts on time and space are revisited. Space-time imagination has achieved worldwide coverage in contemporary Brazilian fiction: writers have constantly explored themes like transnational movements, migration and exile, representing transits all over the world and across national geographies. Therefore, examining Brazilian literature of the last decades has been a way of analysing new global cartographies through varied imagined peoples and identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artigo propõe uma hipótese alternativa para a interpretação de Dom Casmurro baseada na análise de um detalhe enigmático do romance -- a citação incompleta do epitáfio retirado de um trecho bíblico e colocado no túmulo de Ezequiel, filho de Capitu ("O Enigma de Ezequiel"). Baseado na solução proposta para esse enigma, o artigo apresenta evidência para demonstrar a existência de um terceiro nível de interpretação do romance. Assim, além da leitura mais rente aos acontecimentos narrados ('nível literal') e daquelas interpretações que vêem no romance uma crítica ao modo de funcionamento da sociedade brasileira e às suas contradições ('nível historico-social'), que correspondem às interpretações em primeiro e segundo nível, o artigo propõe um nível subjacente adicional ('nível moral') em que o tema central de Dom Casmurro é visto como relacionado à questão moral da escravidão. Ou seja, o artigo argumenta que o romance contém, de maneira subjacente, uma lição moral, fundamentada em preceitos éticos derivados de uma passagem da Bíblia -- o episódio do Rei de Tiro do Livro de Ezequiel -- que fornece a chave para a interpretação alegórica que o artigo propõe. Deste ponto de vista, ao invés do julgamento de Capitu por um suposto adultério, que constitui o tema do nível literal do romance, o tema do nível moral subjacente de Dom Casmurro implica na absolvição de Capitu e envolve, na verdade, o julgamento e punição de Bento Santiago e de seu amigo Escobar--e por extensão, a condenação moral da sociedade escravagista brasileira que ambos representam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. It informs that the writer has invented a narrative device, which transformed him to a world class novelist. This needs a biographical and psychological explanation. His near to blind condition after the age of forty has changed his view. Machado's innovations are aesthetic solutions to the objective problems, which has transferred the Brazilian novel and in general the Brazilian culture too. It has an impact on the ex-colonial societies in general.

Discusses the emergence of contemporary Brazilian novel in the 1960s. Criticisms on the Brazilian novel; Information on popular Brazilian novelists; Relationship of the books of chivalry.