Using John Gledson's suggestion that there is "a profound affinity between Machado de Assis and Austen, particularly in their omnipresent, meticulous and implicitly aggressive irony" (cf. "A Parasita azul"), as a starting point, this article intends to investigate the potential of said affinity by interrogating the uses which both authors made of irony as an instrument of social criticism and the possible differences which can be established between the way each writer mobilizes it in order to represent their world.
irony; novel; Machado de Assis; Jane Austen; social criticism