British Literature 1640-1789

An Anthology

Robert DeMaria

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118952474
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Spanning the period from the British Civil War to the French Revolution, the fourth edition of this successful anthology increases its coverage of canonical writings, plays, and of the development of British Literature in the American colonies.

• A thoroughly updated new edition of this popular anthology which focuses firmly on the eighteenth century without neglecting the seventeenth century
• Contains new texts including the play Rover by Aphra Behn, and Beggars' Opera by John Gay; increased canonical works, including works by Dryden, Pope, and Johnson; and historical contextual materials, with particualr attention to the Americas
• Features updated introductions throughout, taking into acccount recent critical works and editions
• Includes useful resources such as an alternative list of contents by theme, and a chronolgy of literary and political events, providing valuable historical and cultural context
  

Aphra Behn (1640?–1689)

Poet, playwright, novelist, and translator, Aphra Behn was among the most versatile writers of her time. She is probably the first woman ever to make a living as a writer, and she was the first woman to be memorialized as a writer in Westminster Abbey. In surveying the history of English literature from her vantage point as a woman in the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf would find in Behn a most important early advocate for the place of women in the world of letters.

Although the facts of Behn’s early life are uncertain, she seems to have been born Eaffrey Johnson, and it is likely that as a young woman she travelled to Surinam or British Guiana. She places herself there amidst the scene of much of the action of her most famous novel, Oroonoko. On her return to England she probably married a merchant named Behn, whose family was Dutch. Shortly thereafter, from 1666 to 1667, Behn was in Antwerp as a spy for the English government under the code name “Astrea,” which she later used as her literary name. At some point early on her husband died or abandoned her, for she was briefly in debtors’ prison in 1667. Not long after this, Behn began writing for a living: remarkably, she published over thirty separate volumes or pamphlets between 1676 and 1689, including an enormous epistolary novel that presents a recent scandal in a thinly veiled fiction. Her work as a playwright began before this period of massive publication and continued deep into it. Behn wrote at least nineteen plays, the first of which to be published was The Forced Marriage (1670). The Rover, perhaps Behn’s best play, was popular enough to support a sequel. The Rover is a romantic comedy about temporarily disenfranchised English cavaliers and their escapades in the masquerade world of Naples at carnival time. Like some of Behn’s poetry, The Rover displays a mastery of sexual innuendo and bawdiness that is much more common in male writers and conventionally thought of as inappropriate in women. Contemporary satirical writings, like that of Thomas Brown, and later accounts, including the article in the first Dictionary of National Biography, express dismay about Behn’s morals. Happily, times have changed and interest has returned to her diverse literary output, and most of all to her novel Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave.

There is an obvious temptation to read Oroonoko as a manifesto of anti-slavery, anti-colonialist, egalitarian, and perhaps even proto-feminist values, but the novel is interesting in many different ways. Although Behn draws on her knowledge of some historical incidents and persons, in genre the work is a romance, a popular fictional form designed to appeal to women and to members of the recently educated middle class. Oroonoko was certainly meant to be popular; but in a startling reversal of stereotypes, Behn substitutes Africans for the European nobles that traditionally take the lead roles in seventeenth-century romances. Yet, in many respects, Prince Oroonoko and his bride are nobler and more traditional than their European counterparts, and the work can be read as profoundly conservative, e...