Violence and Awe: The Foundations of Government in Aphra Behn’s New World Settings
Richard Frohock, University of California
Volume 8, no. 4, July 1996
©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
In 1975 George Guffey called attention to the political topicality of Oroonoko, finding in it evidence of Behn’s avid Toryism and parallels to the issues leading up to the Glorious Revolution. Recently, political readings of Behn’s novel have become more frequent, though now a different kind of political reading, attending to the ideological issues of race, class, and gender. Oroonoko is resituated in its colonial context and attention is focused on colonial politics, slavery, trade, and gender. Such work makes clear that Behn’s New World setting is more than a vehicle for commenting on post-Restoration domestic politics: it serves to theorize English colonial authority.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “America” include:
Episodic or Novelistic?: Law in the Atlantic and the Form of Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack
by GABRIEL CERVANTES (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
“New People in a New World”?: Defoe’s Ambivalent Narratives of Emigration
by JOSEPH F. BARTOLOMEO (ECF 23.3, Spring 2011)
Sarah Scott and America: Sir George Ellison, The Man of Real Sensibility, and the Squire of Horton
by EVE TAVOR BANNET (ECF 22.4, Summer 2010)
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