The practice of literary criticism in Brazil is characterized historically by the high quality and vitality of critical debate and its importance to national literary, intellectual, cultural, and political life. A progressive development of critical self-awareness is interconnected with foundations and concepts of national history and culture. Dependent on literary creation, on one hand, and archival or legal documents, on the other, critical writing forms a strong and prolific tradition, recently documented in Wilson Martins’s two-volume history of Brazilian literary criticism (A critica literdria no Brasil) and six-volume history of the Brazilian intelligentsia (História da inteligência brasileira), and further described in a wide bibliography of essays on the nature and theory of criticism in Brazil. Cosmopolitan thinkers in a South American context, exemplary founding figures of criticism from the nineteenth century established parameters of intellectual debate, from agnostic and revolutionary to orthodox and traditional, that to a great extent continue to shape the contemporary interchange of critical ideas. The continuing broad social and intellectual influence of critical debate today can be inferred from its prominence in journalistic literary supplements and its continuing relevance to national issues, as well as its growing role in universities and research.

Historical approaches to Brazilian criticism traditionally emphasize exemplary figures and fundamental texts within a chronological framework. Writings of major figures in criticism, starting in the nineteenth century from the Romantics to Silvio Romero (1851–1914) and Araripe Júnior (1848–1911), can be read both chronologically, drawing on their relationships with literary movements and periods, and thematically, following the evolution and development of their philosophical foundations.