He was to introduce writers such as Robert Musil and Kafka to Brazilian audiences, along with the literary criticism of Wilhelm Dilthey, Benedetto Croce, Walter Benjamin and others.

He also published essays on philosophers and sociologists such as Friedrich Engels and Max Weber, as well as on Brazilian writers he came to discover when in the country, writing on Carlos Drummond de Andrade e Graciliano Ramos.

Perhaps the peak of Carpeaux's production was his eight-volume História da Literatura Ocidental (History of Western Literature),[6] available only in Portuguese, in spite of being in public domain.

Late critic José Lino Grünewald labelled it one of the brightest moments of the language in prose, despite the fact that Carpeaux was not a native speaker.

In this series, Carpeaux begins with an analysis of classical Greek and Latin literatures and proceeds until the twentieth century avant-garde movements such as surrealism and dadaism, encompassing every major literary establishments in between.

[7] To Antonio Candido, Carpeaux's "universal vision allows him to surmount the eventual limitations of critic nacionalism, whose historic function is important in certain moments, but which must not serve to obliterate the true dimension of the literary phenomena, which, through its own nature, is transcendental as well as national.