Manduca’s Choice: Machado de Assis, the Crimean War, and the Affects of the Semiglobal
Journal: TRANSMODERNITY Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World
Year: 2023

This essay closely examines the role played by the Crimean War in Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s 1900 novel Dom Casmurro . In portraying the narrator of the novel, Bento Santiago, nicknamed “Casmurro,” and his boyhood friend, Manduca, as quarreling over their preference in the 1854-56 conflict between Russia and an Anglo-French-Ottoman coalition, Machado delineates certain character traits in the two friends, differentiating the sympathetic Manduca, doomed or die young, and the dour, longer-la