Oroonoko, the rover, and other works

Title:

Personal Author:

Behn, Aphra, 1640-1689.

ISBN:

9780140433388

Publication Information:

London, England ; New York, N.Y. : Penguin Books, 1992.

Physical Description:

384 pages ; 20 cm.

Series:

Penguin classics

Penguin classics.

Contents:

Prose. The fair jilt -- Oroonoko -- Love-letters to a gentleman -- Plays. The rover -- The Widow Ranter -- Poems. Love armed -- Epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy -- The disappointment -- To Mr. Creech (under the name of Daphnis) on his excellent translation of Lucretius -- A letter to Mr. Creech at Oxford, written in the last great frost -- Song : on her loving two equally -- To the fair Clarinda, who made love to me, imagined more than woman -- On desire : a Pindaric -- A Pindaric poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet.

Summary:

Works by "the first truly professional woman writer in English."

Subject Term:

Enslaved persons -- Fiction.

Slave trade -- Fiction.

Princes -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Caribbean Area -- Fiction.

Suriname -- Fiction.

Africa -- Fiction.

Added Author:

Todd, Janet, 1942-

Electronic Access:

Table of contents http://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/toc/9780140433388.pdf

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Call Number	Status
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Summary

When Prince Oroonoko's passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. Oroonoko's noble bearing soon wins the respect of his English captors, but his struggle for freedom brings about his destruction. Inspired by Aphra Behn's visit to Surinam, Oroonoko (1688) reflects the author's romantic view of Native Americans as simple, superior peoples 'in the first state of innocence, before men knew how to sin'. The novel also reveals Behn's ambiguous attitude to African slavery - while she favoured it as a means to strengthen England's power, her powerful and moving work conveys its injustice and brutality.

Author Notes

Aphra Behn is often considered the first Englishwoman to support herself as a writer. She was unquestionably the leading woman playwright of the Restoration period. Behn is also notable for her poetry and fiction. While still in her twenties, she traveled with her family to Surinam, in South America, where she witnessed a slave insurrection, much like the rebellion that figures prominently in her novel Oroonoko (1688), a work that introduced the character of the noble savage.

Behn was well connected at court and for a brief time was sent to Antwerp as a spy. Around 1670, with the help of John Dryden, she established a career in the theater, and, during the following two decades, rarely was her work absent from the London stage. Among the comedies that bear the special stamp of her libertine, feminist, and Tory political views are The Dutch Lover (1673), The Feign'd Curtezans (1679), and her best-known works, The Rover (1677) and The Rover, Part II (1681).

Readers seeking an introduction to the skill and sensibility of Aphra Behn will do well to look into her lyric poetry, which is often represented in recent anthologies of women writers.

(Bowker Author Biography)