Abstract
This paper proposes a comparative analysis between the autobiographical writings of the Brazilian intellectual and politician Joaquim Nabuco's and the North-American writer Henry James's. It analyzes how Nabuco's and James fashion their subjectivities and confront some of the problems that interested intellectuals at the turn of nineteenth and in the early twentieth century. Nabuco's My formation (1900) as well as James's The American scene (1907) represent the sentiment called "the Mazombo's dilemma" by Evaldo Cabral de Mello, i.e., the dialectical tension between European humanism and the emotional relation to the native country, which affected part of the South and North-American upper classes.
Keywords
Joaquim Nabuco; Henry James; Belle époque modernity; European humanism; National sentiment