The True Geography of Solitary Stars: Machado de Assis and the Carnival Misplaced

The place of Brazilian writer Machado de Assis in the carnivalesque literary tradition has been alluded to by a number of critics, but the larger implications of this suggestion have not previously been interrogated in depth. This thesis utilises methods of traditional and creative research to illuminate hitherto unseen aspects of Machado’s poetics, as well as the carnivalesque literary genre and the circulation of that genre between core and periphery discourses. The second part of this thesis, the original novel, The True Geography of Solitary Stars, develops a poetics that draws deeply from the novels of Machado’s “mature” phase.