Novel Cleopatras

Nicole Horejsi is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at California State University in Los Angeles.

Introduction
   Rites of Initiation: Reading Epic in Eighteenth-Century Britain
   Returning to Narrative Origins: Finding Alternatives in Vergil’s Aeneid
   Dido in Barbados: The Case of Spectator

Part 1: Demythologizing Dido: Epic and Romance
1 “‘Pulcherrima Dido’: Jane Barker and the Epic of Exile” 
   The “Glory of the Scipio’s”? Exilius’ Romance Rewriting of History
   Resembling Dido: Reinventing Carthage and Rome
   Becoming Roman: Exilius and Jacobite Identity
   Representing Troy Town: Barker’s Jacobite Nostalgia
2. “‘What is there of a Woman Worth Relating?’ Revising the Aeneid in Henry Fielding’s Amelia
   “A Fortress on a Rock”: New Epic Foundations in Amelia
   “A Good Woman and Yet”: Harrison and Epic Precedents
   Dalila, Jezebel, Medea? Miss Mathews
   Mrs. Bennet-Atkinson and “All the Fortune given her by her Father”

Part 2: Mythologizing Cleopatra: Romance Historiography and the Queens of Egypt
3. “‘Making History out of Nothing’: Creating a Women’s Classical Canon in Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote”
   The Example of Outlandish People: Romance Values and the Geopolitical Landscape
   Laws of its Own: An Empire of Love?
   “But for the famous Scudéry”: Reviving Classical Precedents
   “A Position almost too Evident for Proof”: Arabella and the Divine
4. “‘Shame’—or ‘Courtly Glory’? Scripting Augustan History in Sarah Fielding’s Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia”
   On Pleasing Delusions: Reading The Lives Against the Grain
   Imagining Power: Fielding’s Cleopatra and the Construction of History
   Being Made a Sacrifice: Octavia and Roman Virtue
5. “Whose ‘Wild and Extravagant Stories’? Challenging Epic in Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance”
   Epic in Prose: Redefining Women’s Fiction
   Revising Origins: The Bible as Oriental Tale
   Penelope, Medea, Deianeira: Classical Epic Revisited
   Seizing Narrative Control: Lessons from Cleopatra and Scheherazade