Thel lives of Cleopatra and Octavia: a antiguidade revisitada por Sarah Fielding.

Abstract

The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, by Sarah Fielding, takes place in a moment of tensions, by its autobiographical model it presents the reality of the eighteenth century disguised as Classical Antiquity. The work appropriates a time lapse between 1750 and 1770 and draws on the historical, political, and literary historical context of the eighteenth century, from this an analysis to the narrative of Fielding was made searching elements that prove the projection of the author's reality in her novel. The bridge was then built between Marco Antonio's Rome and eighteenth century England. This work is also supported by the study of the novel genre, since it is possible to perceive an exclusion of the feminine and the Bluestockings group in the literary criticism of the time, when the woman was still only seen the public reading position, being forgotten its relevant participation in the development of the romance genre in its earliest days. Taking advantage of the Aristotelian concept of mimesis, together with the idea of the external that becomes internal from Antonio Candido, this work seeks to find relationships between the events and characters of the novel and the historical context of eighteenth-century England, showing the strong ideological presence of the Bluestockings group - of which the author was a part - in order to expose the importance of female participation during the rise of the romanesque genre. In other words, the present study intends to demonstrate how the context of wars, the literary context of the production and publication of the novel, and the threads of thought from the Bluestockings, despite being external events to the work, are found in Fielding's novel , despite the apparent historical distance between ancient Rome and the eighteenth century.