The incorporation of the modern model of literary communication, which implicates distance between the sender and the receiver, took place in Brazil at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century in a way which did not erase the former model, associated with oral contexts as immediate and participative way of symbolical exchange. As this new narrative voice, seen as a “local form,” will manifest itself in works by some of the most important modern Brazilian authors, a study of cultural transformations which occurred in Brazil in the late 19th century as a period of radical social and political changes (the abolition of slavery, the end of the empire and the beginning if the republic) is crucial to understand the evolution of Brazilian literature until the beginning of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964). The aim of this book is to provide an in-depth analysis of the oral, written and auditive dimension of selected novels by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), with particular emphasis on the process of gradual assimilation of modern narrative techniques, based on the written (typographical) dimension of the book, in a culture dominated by patterns of oral communication.