Based on Michel de Certeau’s interrogations about the “historiographical operation”, this article examines the ways in which José de Alencar sought to legitimize his way of making the past an object of knowledge. We comprehend, thus, that novelists have also undertaken the task of understanding the past. And in addition to this fact, or underlying it, novelists came to rival the alleged circumscription that historians were establishing. In this sense, we intend to approach how José de Alencar’s writing partook in those strains, which started to be strengthened in the 19th century, turning history into the “other” of literature and literature into the “other” of history. Some clashes between history and literature will be examined, considering that the struggles for boundaries between history and literature are part of the very legitimacy that the writing of history constitutes for itself. Some comparisons will be made between José de Alencar’s writing and that of other novelists, in order to chart disputes and identify the perspective of realizing how literature came to assert itself as the “other” of “history writing”.