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Mrs A. Behn and the Myth of Oroonoko-Imoinda

Mrs A. Behn and the Myth of Oroonoko-Imoinda

Robert A. Erickson, University of California

Volume 5, no. 3, April 1993

©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.

ABSTRACT

If the act of writing is always in some sense an abbreviated form of walking, travelling/travailing, and exploring, then Aphra Behn’s unconventional “Female Pen” reiterates the adventures of a highly unconventional female explorer and literary pioneer. Amid a resurgence of recent interest in her work, especially her short narratives, we are still in the process of discovering just how richly innovative Behn is as a narrative artist. Oroonoko, published in the explosive political atmosphere of 1688 (and a year before her death) is a thickly woven and delicately allusive verbal artifact. Behn was forty-eight at the time, poor, sick, suffering from a variety of diseases, and actively and intently rereading Scripture. She was exactly double the age of her free-spirited and socially privileged and powerful “Eyewitness,” the younger self-as-character who participates in the crucial historical events of the narrative.

Other ECF articles on the topic of “Aphra Behn” include:

Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power
by CYNTHIA RICHARDS (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)

Women, Comedy, and A Simple Story
by HYE-SOO LEE (ECF 20.2, Winter 2007-8)

Muddy Allegiance and Shiny Booty: Aphra Behn’s Anglo-Dutch Politics
by REBECCA S. WOLSK (ECF 17.1, October 2004)

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