This article discusses the strategies used by Machado de Assis in his famous essay "Instinto de nacionalidade" (1873), not only to insert his literary production in the context of Brazilian literature of the time, but also to speculate about the future of a literature not based on Brazilian literary nationalism, or dependent on it. In other words: Machado's essay provides us, his future readers, with a special light over his own fictional work of years to come, since it proposes a principle of indetermination in order to individualise Brazilian literature, a principle that had depended, until that point, on the specifically Brazilian traits found in literary texts.
literary criticism; literary nationalism; tradition