Convergências e divergências entre Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, de Machado de Assis, viagem sentimental por França e Itália, de Laurence Sterne e Pamela, de Samuel Richardson

Abstract

Machado de Assis’ great work, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas) has often been compared to Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. These works share, undeniably, a fragmented presentation of fictional reality and a higher than usual degree of self-consciousness. However, if one partakes Roberto Schwarz’s view that Memórias is a novel highly charged with social accusation, one is reminded of another eighteenth-century British author, Samuel Richardson, who revealed a stark class prejudice in his first novel, Pamela. This paper, thus, attempts to find similarities and divergences among these three novels, comparing the works of the two British writers with Machado’s marterpiece. It also deals with the role of the reader, on whom different demands are made in each of the three novels.