The Alienist is a famous humorous literary work by Brazilian writer Machado de Assis.
Many consider it a short story, but most critics and experts consider it a novel because of its narrative structure.
Published in 1882, when it appears incorporated into the volume Papéis Avulsos, it had previously been published in A Estação (Rio de Janeiro), from October 15, 1881 to March 15, 1882.
Sanderlei Silveira ® - 2023-09-18T09:52-03:00 - SA (S.BR) L
The Alienist is a famous humorous literary work by Brazilian writer Machado de Assis.
Many consider it a short story, but most critics and experts consider it a novel because of its narrative structure.
Published in 1882, when it appears incorporated into the volume Papéis Avulsos, it had previously been published in A Estação (Rio de Janeiro), from October 15, 1881 to March 15, 1882.
The story tells about Dr. Bacamarte, who was convinced that he is great, that he marries his wife because she would have the mental and physical characteristics to conceive him a child, which does not happen and that is why he goes deeper into his studies. , which at that time were little explored, madness. So he creates Casa Verde, a kind of mental hospital.
About the author:
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro, June 21, 1839 — Rio de Janeiro, September 29, 1908) was a Brazilian writer, widely considered to be the greatest name in national literature. He wrote in practically all literary genres, being a poet, novelist, chronicler, playwright, short story writer, serial writer, journalist, and literary critic. He witnessed the political change in the country when the Republic replaced the Empire and was a great commentator and reporter of the political-social events of his time.
His extensive work consists of nine novels and plays, two hundred short stories, five collections of poems and sonnets, and more than six hundred chronicles.
Machado de Assis is considered the introducer of Realism in Brazil, with the publication of Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881). This novel is placed alongside all his later productions, Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro, Esaú e Jacó and Memorial de Aires, orthodoxly known as belonging to his second phase, in which traces of pessimism and irony are noted, although there is no break in romantic residues. From this phase, critics highlight that his best works are those from the Realist Trilogy.[1] His first literary phase consists of works such as Ressurreição, A Mão e a Luva, Helena and Iaiá Garcia, where characteristics inherited from Romanticism, or "conventionalism", as modern critics prefer, can be noted.
His work was of fundamental importance for Brazilian literary schools of the 19th and 20th centuries and appears today as being of great academic and public interest. He influenced great names in letters, such as Olavo Bilac, Lima Barreto, Drummond de Andrade, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and others. In his lifetime, he achieved relative fame and prestige in Brazil, however he did not enjoy external popularity at the time. Nowadays, due to his innovation and audacity in precocious themes, he is often seen as the Brazilian writer of unprecedented production, so that, recently, his name and his work have reached many critics, scholars and admirers from all over the world. Machado de Assis is considered one of the great geniuses in the history of literature, alongside authors such as Dante, Shakespeare and Camões.