Ações e relações: pontos de contato entre as personagens de Otelo e O retrato de Dorian Gray

Abstract

Comparative studies has long been used in research aimed at proving that two or more literary facts can be related. In this sense, it is still perceived that over the years, comparative literature has developed, hence refining its guiding concepts and expanding its scope of action. With this in view, it is relevant to consider these notions in the studies carried out in this work, which relates one character to another, more specifically, two characters belonging to different works and contexts: Iago, the character from the Elizabethan play Otelo (1604), written by William Shakespeare, and Henry Hotton, from Oscar Wilde's Victorian novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). The study of these possible points of connection are essentially based on the comparative studies by Nitrini (2000), Carvalhal (2006), Oliveira (2009), and Soethe (2012) and other exponent authors from the comparative literature field. It is worth pointing out that all of these researchers consider that comparative literature relies on analyzing possible connections, relationships between works, authors, and characters, since their studies also emphasize the idea that nothing is entirely new, but everything that is created had an inspiration of something that already exists. In this way, taking into account the mentioned theory, the roles that the characters perform and of excerpts from the books in question, the possible links existing in the personalities and attitudes of these two characters were demonstrated through the analysis of the plot.