"Tales of Love and Gallantry": The politics of Oroonoko

Huntington Library Quarterly

Volumn 67, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 573-605

  Kroll, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849399442     PISSN: 00187895     EISSN: 1544399X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2004.67.4.573     Document Type: Review

References (68)

1. For a thorough critique of many of the problems in Oroonoko criticism, see Derek Hughes, "Race, Gender, and Scholarly Practice: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Essays in Criticism 52 (2002): 1-22
2. Ros Ballaster, "New Hystericism: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: The Body, the Text, and the Feminist Critic," in Isobel Armstrong, ed., New Feminist Discourses (London, 1992), 291
3. Moira Ferguson, "Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm," NLH 23 (1992): 349
4. Charlotte Sussman, "The Other Problem with Women: Reproduction and Slave Culture in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," in Heidi Hutner, ed., Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 212
5. Margaret Ferguson, "News from the New World: Miscegenous Romance in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter," in David Lee Miller et al., eds. The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 164
6. Albert Rivero, "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and the 'Blank Spaces' of Colonial Fictions," SEL 39 (1999): 444
7. Oddvar Holmesland, "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Cultural Dialectics and the Novel," ELH 68 (2001): 57-79
8. See Beverle Houston, "Usurpation and Dismemberment: Oedipal Tyranny in Oroonoko," Literature and Psychoanalysis 32 (1986): 31
9. Sussman, "The Other Problem with Women," 230
10. David Hoegberg, "Caesar's Toils: Allusion and Rebellion in Oroonoko," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7 (1995): 240, 243
11. Patricia Pender, "Competing Conceptions: Rhetorics of Representation in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Women's Writing 8 (2001): 457
12. see also Lipking's more recent essay, "'Others,' Slaves, and Colonists in Oroonoko," in Hughes and Todd, eds., Cambridge Companion, 172
13. See Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: The Life of Aphra Behn, 1640-1689 (1977; reprint ed., London, 1989), 43
14. Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York, 1980), 42
15. and Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (New Brunswick, N.J., 1996), 37
16. "New Light on Aphra Behn" [Auckland, 1961], 8-17
17. and "New Light on the Background and Early Life of Aphra Behn," in Janet Todd, ed., Aphra Behn Studies [Cambridge, 1996], 310-20). Many influential essays endorse readings consistent with a reflection theory of representation
18. and George Warren, An Impartial Description of Surinam [London, 1667], 23). Goreau asserts that Oroonoko is "Koromantee," who looked different from other West Africans (Reconstructing Aphra, 301 n. 23)
19. Montague Summers, ed., The Works of Aphra Behn, 6 vols. (1915; reprint ed., New York, 1967), 5:127
20. Todd, Secret Life, 38
21. Sussman, "The Other Problem with Women," 229
22. Hoegberg, "Caesar's Toils," 257
23. Brown, "The Romance of Empire," 51, 57-59
24. See for example, The Golden Coast, or A Description of Guinney (London, 1665)
25. and Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London, 1705)
26. See also Joanna Lipking, "Confusing Matters: Searching the Backgrounds of Oroonoko," in Todd, ed., Aphra Behn Studies, 271
27. Warren, Impartial Description, 23, 6, 24
28. Elliott Visconsi, "A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter," ELH 69 (2002): 673-701
29. Guffey, "Occasion and Accomplishment," 17
30. David Ogg, England in the Reins of James II and William III (1955; reprint ed., Oxford, 1984), 177
31. John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence, ed. William Bray, 4 vols. (London, 1900), 2:285
32. Evelyn, Diary, 2: 285-86
33. Narcisssus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, 6 vols. (1857; reprint ed., Wilmington, Del., 1974), 1:442
34. Aphra Behn, trans. Bernard de Fontenelle, A History of Oracles (London, 1688), sig. A3v
35. Lodge writes, "The prosecution of the seven bishops was the most impolitic act of James, and proved to be the immediate occasion of the revolution that followed"; History of England, 273
36. An Account of the Proceedings at the King's Bench Bar at Westminster Hall, against the Seven Bishops (London, 1688), sig. A1v
37. Luttrell, Brief Relation, 2:448
38. See Edward Arber, ed., The Term Catalogues, 1668-1709, 3 vols. (London, 1903-6), 2:230-31
39. Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford, 1928), 138
40. Anita Pacheco, "Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," SEL 34 (1994): 491-506
41. and McKerrow, Introduction to Bibliography, 91
42. John Dryden, Britannia Rediviva (London, 1688), 6
43. Francis Sandford, The History of the Coronation of ... James II ... and ... Queen Mary (London, 1687)
44. Hughes, "Race, Gender, and Scholarly Practice," 5-6, 8
45. Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge, 1996), 32
46. The King's Dispensing Power Explicated and Asserted (London, 1687?), 2
47. [G.M.], A Letter from an English Merchant in London to his Dutch Correspondent in Amsterdam about Publick Affairs (London, 1688), 2, 1
48. see John Evelyn, Navigation and Commerce (London, 1674), 99-114
49. and Alexander Justice, A General Treatise of the Dominion and Laws of the Sea (London, 1705), 258, 262-63
50. Sanford, Surinam Justice, sig. A2v (italics reversed)
51. For example, Aristotle writes of Lacedaemonian kingship that "the royal power is not absolute"; Politics, 83
52. I include a fairly comprehensive survey of this tradition in The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1991), chap. 6
53. The Turkish Secretary (London, 1688)
54. The Art of Making Love, in Two New Novels (London, 1688), 5
55. The Turkish Secretary, 3
56. Lipking, "Confusing Matters," 267
57. Though generally the ancient constitution is thought of as Saxon, it is clear that on occasion the Picts are linked with the Saxons in representing early Britain at the end of Roman occupatio; see Daniel Langhorne, An Introduction to the History of England (London, 1676), 150, 164
58. Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III, 197-98
59. The Dutch Design Anatomized (London, 1688), 11
60. James Ramsey, Bloody Newes from the East-Indies (1651)
61. John Darell, A True and Compendious Narration (1665; see figure 5)
62. Dryden, Amboyna (1673)
63. Settle, Insignia Bataviae (London, 1688), sig. A2r
64. R. B., The History of the Nine Worthies of the World (London, 1687), 63
65. Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (London, 1688), 65
66. Aristotle, Politics, 93. Freud, citing the Stuarts as an historical example, argues that the totem of the powerful king also needs powerful taboos to contain his power, so that which we most love we also fear. For example, he writes, "We know that the dead are powerful rulers, but we may perhaps be surprised when we learn that they are treated as enemies"; Totem and. Taboo (New York, 1950), 65
67. Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1956), 163
68. Behn, trans. Fontenelle, History of Oracles, sig. A4r