SOURCE: An introduction to The Devil's Church, and Other Stories, by Machado de Assis, translated by Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu, University of Texas Press, 1977, pp. ix-xiii.

In the following essay, Schmitt and Ishimatsu examine Machado 's fiction as a kind of social and literary criticism, and also discuss the ways in which it approached literary modernism.

The modern Brazilian short story begins with the mature works of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), acclaimed almost unanimously as Brazil's greatest writer. Between 1858 and 1906, Machado wrote more than two hundred stories, and no other writer in Brazil achieved his technical mastery of the story form before the 1930s.

Until recent years, Machado's reputation abroad was not commensurate with the quality of his remarkable stories and novels or his high position in Western letters. The Brazilian critic Antônio Cândido considered it a paradox that a writer of international...