Mehr lesen
Aphra Behn's work has always been subject to critical fashion and her literary reputation was only really secured in the closing decade of this century, especially by new historicist and feminist critics. The essays collected here represent the best of a range of contemporary critical views, discussing both Behn's drama and her prose writings. Janet Todd provides a stimulating introduction mapping Behn' s literary reception, situating the works of the critics included in a broader literary context and pointing towards Behn as a newly politicized figure at the close of the twentieth century.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgements
General Editors' Preface
Introduction; J.Todd
Who Was That Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn; C.Gallagher
Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn's 'The Rover'; E.Diamond
'Suspect my loyalty when I lose my virtue': Sexual Politics and Party in Aphra Behn's Plays of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678-83; S.J.Owen
Spectacular Death: History and Story in 'The Widow Ranter'; J.Todd
'But to the touch were soft': Pleasure, Power and Impotence in 'The Disappointment' and 'The Golden Age'; J.Munns
Desire and the Uncoupling of Myth in Behn's Erotic Poems; C.Barash
Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn; J.Pearson
Love-Letters: Engendering Desire; R.Ballaster
Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn's 'Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister'; E.Pollak
The Romance of Empire: 'Oroonoko' and the Trade in Slaves; L.Brown
Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn's 'Oroonoko'; M.Ferguson
Further Reading
Notes on Contributors
Index.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Janet Todd is an internationally renowned scholar of early women writers. She has edited the complete works of England's first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, and the Enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as novels by Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley and Eliza Fenwick and memoirs of the confidence trickster Mary Carleton.
Janet Todd is the general editor of the 9-volume
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen and editor of
Jane Austen in Context and the
Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Among her critical works are
Women's Friendship in Literature,
The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 and the
Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. She has written four biographies: of Aphra Behn and three linked women, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter, and her aristocratic Irish pupils.
In the 1970s Janet Todd taught in the USA, during which time she began the first journal devoted to women's writing. Back in the UK in the 1990s she co-founded the journal
Women's Writing. Janet has had a peripatetic and busy life, working at universities in Ghana, the US, and Puerto Rico, as well as England and Scotland. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen and lives in Cambridge.
Zusammenfassung
Aphra Behn's work has always been subject to critical fashion and her literary reputation was only really secured in the closing decade of this century, especially by new historicist and feminist critics.
