Machado de Assis and Milton: Possible Dialogues

In There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . and It’s a Good Thing Too (1994), Stanley Fish observes that “the Miltonic corpus, rather than being autonomous, is intertextual, the product of not a single voice but of multiple voices,” and that “we are already blessed (if that is the word) by studies of Milton and Virgil, Milton and Plato, Milton and the pastoral, Milton and warfare, Milton and science, Milton and opera . . . and on and on and on.”1 His argument suggests an exhaustion of Milton studies that many other critics may have felt at that time. Fish’s position in the 1990s was that there were “no new directions in Milton studies.” One underexplored direction, however, is south, for the subject of Milton and South American voices has not been part of the larger conversation. International literary criticism rightly refers to Milton’s presence as a major figure in English, German, and French Romanticism; this point is also true for Brazilian Romanticism, even though the reception of the English poet and his oeuvre in Brazil cannot be considered to be widespread at this time.2 One prominent contributor to Milton’s pan-American reputation is Brazil’s most widely read and studied writer, Joaquim Maria