The thesis deals with the production of literary-critical Machado de Assis in his dialogue with nineteenth-century Brazilian literary debate, especially in the 1870s, a time of ferment of discourse of modernity. The central hypothesis is that the discussion with Machado Brazilian states a relationship of ownership and refusal that allows one side to identify a common literary heritage Brazilian continually being mobilized in this, the annuity, and another move from the leading reference in the nationalist Brazilian letters, which imposes nationality and literary value. To use the expression consecrated by Silvio Romero, in the 1870s a bunch of new ideas circulating on the literate environment in Brazil, powered by a new European intellectual repertoire, claiming from this, a break before the temporal assumptions of Romanticism. The analysis Machado on this context can be found in three texts, which serve as guiding principles of the thesis: Noticia atual da literatura brasileira: Instinto de Nacionalidade (1873); A nova geração (1879 ) e Eça de Queirós: o Primo Basílio (1878). With these and relying on the accumulation of its production earlier critique, Machado elucidates the problems to be referred by the theory, whose articulation is in a historicized understanding of the concept literature, common and new romantics of 1870: the desire to create a literature more independently linked to an experience of time considering the peculiarity of this area as possible rupture, and the relationship with the Brazilian historical process outside and above, taken as a time of civilization, ordering Brazilian ideas for a continuous effort to update, the association between literature and reality, convenient to use given to the ethical debate in Brazilian literature.