From magazines to books: Machado de Assis, Julio Verne, and their editors

Abstract

This article studies some aspects of the relationship between two editors (Baptiste-Louis Gamier and Pierre-Jules Hetzel) and two of their writers (respectively Machado de Assis and Jules Verne), a duo in France and another in Brazil. We demonstrate that many editorial actions of Baptiste-Louis Gamier reveal that the methods for producing literary contents were the same in America and Europe. One of these methods was an expansion of the circulation of literary texts, from periodicals to books. Through this, we also discuss that national literature is not only the result of the production of a country, but the result of global contacts, cultural exchanges and actions of mediators. In this process, tensions arise between publishers and writers and comparing Machado de Assis and Julio Verne relations with their publishers discloses aspects of their trajectories of consecration and acquisition of symbolic capital, according to Bourdieu's concepts.