A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "Oroonoko," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
Aphra Behn was one of the first professional English female writers and Oroonoko was one of her earliest works. It is the love story between Oroonoko, the grandson of an African king, and the daughter of that king's general. The king takes the girl into his harem, and when she plans to escape with his grandson, sells her as a slave. When Oroonoko tries to follow her he is caught by an English slave trader and taken to the same West Indian island as his love.
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.
Once merely a footnote in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies and rarely taught, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), by Aphra Behn, is now essential reading for scholars and a classroom favorite. It appears in general surveys and in courses on early modern British writers, postcolonial literature, American literature, women's literature, drama, the slave narrative, and autobiography. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," provides not only resources for the teacher of Oroonoko but also a brief chronology of Behn's life and work. In part 2, "Approaches," essays offer a diversity of perspectives appropriate to a text that challenges student assumptions and contains not one story but many: Oroonoko as a romance, as a travel account, as a heroic tragedy, as a window to seventeenth-century representations of race, as a reflection of Tory-Whig conflict in the time of Charles II.
In this hilarious and thought-provoking contemporary teen standalone that’s perfect for fans of Moxie, a bookworm finds a way to fight back when her school bans dozens of classic and meaningful books. Clara Evans is horrified when she discovers her principal’s “prohibited media” hit list. The iconic books on the list have been pulled from the library and aren’t allowed anywhere on the school’s premises. Students caught with the contraband will be sternly punished. Many of these stories have changed Clara’s life, so she’s not going to sit back and watch while her draconian principal abuses his power. She’s going to strike back. So Clara starts an underground library in her locker, doing a shady trade in titles like Speak and The Chocolate War. But when one of the books she loves most is connected to a tragedy she never saw coming, Clara’s forced to face her role in it. Will she be able to make peace with her conflicting feelings, or is fighting for this noble cause too tough for her to bear? “Suggested Reading is a beautiful reminder that there is nothing simple about loving a book.” —David Arnold, New York Times bestselling author of Mosquitoland
Aphra Behn was the first Englishwoman to earn her living from writing. This collection of critical essays explores the different genres in Behn's canon, including her plays, criticism, fiction and poetry, from a wide variety of feminist theoretical approaches.
How does a contemporary society restore to its public memory a momentous event like its own participation in transatlantic slavery? What are the stakes of once more restoring the slave trade to public memory? What can be learned from this history? Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace explores these questions in her study of depictions and remembrances of British involvement in the slave trade. Skillfully incorporating a range of material, Wallace discusses and analyzes how museum exhibits, novels, television shows, movies, and a play created and produced in Britain from 1990 to 2000 grappled with the subject of slavery. Topics discussed include a walking tour in the former slave-trading port of Bristol; novels by Caryl Phillips and Barry Unsworth; a television adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park; and a revival of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In each case, Wallace reveals how these works and performances illuminate and obscure the history of the slave trade and its legacy. While Wallace focuses on Britain, her work also speaks to questions of how the United States and other nations remember inglorious chapters from their past.
This volume highlights the connections that link both literary discourse and the discourse about literature to the conceptual or representational frameworks, practices, and cognitive results (the ‘truths’) of disciplines such as psychology, medicine, epistemology, anthropology, cartography, chemistry, and rhetoric. Literature and the sciences, embedded as they are in specific historical circumstances, thus emerge as fields of inquiry and representation which share a number of assumptions and are determined or constructed by several modes of cross-fertilization. The range of authors examined includes Richard Brome, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Shaftesbury, Defoe, Swift, Richardson and Smollett, while emphasis is placed on how authors of literature regard the practices, practitioners and findings of science, as well as on how ‘mimesis’ intersects with scientific discourse. Contributors are Bernhard Klein, Daniel Essig García, George Rousseau, Jorge Bastos da Silva, Kate De Rycker, Maria Avxentevskaya, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, Mihaela Irimia, Richard Nate, and Wojciech Nowicki.
A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "The Rover," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
