This thesis investigates the notions of colonialism and dependency and the allegories of Brazil in Antonio Candido s literary historiography in the 1960s and early 1970s. In this context, the critic traveled to different countries and came into contact with new intellectual, conceptual and political repertoires that enabled him to promote, based on a hermeneutics of distance, a transformation of the ideas with which his work had operated in the previous decades, especially with regard to the interpretation of Latin America s own socio-cultural reality. From then on, and already imbued with a disbelief in the developmentalist panacea, Candido sought to investigate the deleterious effects of colonialism on the formation of Latin America, also linking them to the structuring of a situation of dependence which, in the 20th century, left the continent with the persistence of the characteristics of underdevelopment in the process of ordering societies. In addition, the critic sought to present, from a dialectical perspective, some allegories of Brazilian historicity present in realist-naturalist fiction, to tension the very political condition of the country at the time, under the aegis of the military dictatorship. Finally, it sought to identify the reasons why, despite being immersed in this historical condition of backwardness, a poetic form of great aesthetic vigor emerged on the continent, Superregionalism, which, in aesthetically inventive tones, dealt with issues considered universal, breaking with strictly national topics.