Abstract
Through its concern with issues of gender, race and class, Oroonoko was guaranteed the attention of late twentieth-century critics and theorists. Feminists emphasized the strong matrilinear claims of Behn in genealogies of the novel: a form supposed to have ‘risen’ with those ‘fathers of the novel’, Fielding and Richardson, in the 1740s — or even Defoe in the 1720s — was already emerging with Behn in the 1680s. New historicists seized on the ideological contradictions inherent in Behn’s writing: Tory, royalist and elitist, she produces a radical, pre-feminist text sometimes regarded as a pioneering anti-slavery narrative. For these reasons alone, Oroonoko is a challenging starting-point for a series of individual readings.1
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Notes
Two earlier critical biographies of Behn, necessarily speculative in view of the scant information available, are Maureen Duffy’s The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640–1689 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1977)
Angeline Goreau’s Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial Press, 1980).
The key work on Behn in the context of slavery is Moira Ferguson’s Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992), see especially ch. 2, ‘Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm’, pp. 27–50.
see Ernest Bernbaum’s ‘Mrs Behn’s Biography, a Fiction’, PMLA 28 (1913), pp. 432–53.
See Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970);
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (Harmordsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 35.
There is nevertheless wide consensus on a select group of critical monographs over the last five decades; some of these are noted below. The most comprehensive biography is now Paula Backscheider’s Daniel Defoe: a Life (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
Earlier studies stressing religious traditions behind Defoe are George Starr’s Defoe and Spiritual Biography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965)
J. Paul Hunter’s The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966).
An important new dimension to Defoe criticism is offered by Lincoln Faller’s Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
See J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990).
John Sutherland, The Best Seller (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
See Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Mythopeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976).
In addition to Zavarzadeh (note 23), see also John Hollowell’s Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977)
John Hellmann’s Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981).
The writings of Behn, Manley and Haywood are the particular subject of Ros Ballaster’s Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
Mary Anne Schofield’s Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990) has interesting chapters on the early and late Haywood, respectively.
William McBurney’s ‘Mrs Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-Century English Novel’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 20 (May 1957), pp. 245–67, was the pioneering essay on Aubin.
Barker has aroused additional critical interest because of the autobiographical dimension of her fiction (e.g. Patricia Meyer Spacks’s Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, 1976).
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© 2001 John Skinner
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Skinner, J. (2001). Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. In: An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62946-2_6
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