Aphra Behn Studies

Author : Janet Todd
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 1996-03-28
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0521471699

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Aphra Behn Studies by Janet Todd Pdf

Aphra Behn was England's first professional woman writer, but her status as a major author has only recently become clear. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Behn was denigrated for her 'unwomanly' subject matter and intellectual immodesty. In the twentieth century she has been increasingly viewed as an important dramatist and poet of the Restoration and a founder of the English novel. This book sets Behn firmly in an historical context of political factions, theatre developments and colonial encounters, and includes chapters on each of the genres in which she wrote: drama, fiction, poetry and translation, and on other aspects of her life, from her publishing struggles to her involvement in American slavery. It is an important resource for those studying seventeenth-century English literature and drama, and to those interested in the development of women's writing.

Author : Derek Hughes,Janet Todd
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2004-11-25
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0521527201

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The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn by Derek Hughes,Janet Todd Pdf

Traditionally known as the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn has now emerged as one of the major figures of the Restoration. She provided more plays for the stage than any other author and greatly influenced the development of the novel with her ground-breaking fiction, especially Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister and Oroonoko, the first English novel set in America. Behn's work straddles the genres: beside drama and fiction, she also excelled in poetry and she made several important translations from French libertine and scientific works. This Companion discusses and introduces her writings in all these fields and provides the critical tools with which to judge their aesthetic and historical importance. It also includes a full bibliography, a detailed chronology and a description of the known facts of her life. The Companion will be an essential tool for the study of this increasingly important writer and thinker.

Author : Janet Todd
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 830 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2013-09-19
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781448212545

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The Secret Life of Aphra Behn by Janet Todd Pdf

'All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn; for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,' said Virginia Woolf. Yet that tomb, in Westminster Abbey, records one of the few uncontested facts about this Restoration playwright, poet, novelist and spy: the date of her death, 16 April 1689. For the rest secrecy and duplicity are almost the key to her life. She loved codes, making and breaking them; writing her life becomes a decoding of a passionate but playful woman. Janet Todd draws on documents she has rediscovered in the Dutch archives, and on Behn's own writings, to tell a story of court, diplomatic and sexual intrigue, and of the rise from humble origins of the first woman to earn her living as a professional writer. Aphra Behn's first notable employment was as a Royal spy in Holland; she had probably also spied in Surinam. It was not until she was in her thirties that she published the first of the 19 plays and other works which established her fame (though not riches) among her 'good, sweet, honey-candied readers'. Many of her works were openly erotic, indeed as frank as anything by her friends Wycherley and Rochester. Some also offered an inside view of court and political intrigues, and Todd reveals the historical scandals and legal cases behind some of Behn's most famous 'fictions'.

Author : Janet Todd
Publisher : Camden House
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Art
ISBN : 1571131655

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The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn by Janet Todd Pdf

This is the first study of the posthumous life of Aphra Behn, the extraordinary vicissitudes of her critical reception, and the personal vilifications of her reputation through three centuries. Beginning with the reception of Behn's work during her lifetime, which she herself helped to orchestrate by performing herself as a seductive woman, a beleaguered lady writer, and a serious intellectual, among other roles, the work ends with the late 20th-century reception of Behn, when the interest in gender, race, and class has made of her almost a postmodern writer. In the 17th century she was seen as a playwright of sexy and propagandist comedies, and attacked by those who disapproved her supposedly unfeminine stance and her royalist politics. Later, as the Restoration period itself fell into disrepute, Behn's plays were denigrated along with those of her fellow men, but greater opprobrium fell on her as a woman, because in the 19th century it was felt that a female writer should have higher morals than a man. During this period, Behn's reputation was exceedingly low, while her short story Oroonoko gained acclaim, freed from any association with its author or her supposedly squalid times. In the 18th and 19th centuries Oroonoko moved from being viewed as political commentary and heroic romance to a sentimental tale of doomed love and then an abolitionist text. In the early twentieth century it was hailed as one of the earliest realist texts, part of the great English ascent into the novel. JANET TODD is professor of English at the University of East Anglia

Author : Aphra Behn
Publisher : ReadHowYouWant.com
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 1736
Category : Great Britain
ISBN : IND:30000108799739

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Love-letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister by Aphra Behn Pdf

Author : Michael L. Stapleton
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 0874138493

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Admired and Understood by Michael L. Stapleton Pdf

Admired and Understood analyzes Behn's only pure verse collection, Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), and situates her in her literary milieu as a poet. Behn's book demonstrates her desire for acceptance in her literary culture, to be admired and understood, as she puts its, the antitheses of what many surmise from reading her other works - that she saw herself primarily as a guerilla critic of her culture's views on race, class, and gender. The introduction to Admired and Understood argues that her colleagues thought of her as poet first, rather than as a dramatist, reviews current criticism about Behn, and provides a brief overview of late seventeenth-century poetical theory. The first chapter explains the intricately interwoven structure of Behn's collection. The next two chapters concern intertextual linkages between Behn and Abraham Cowley, as well as the influence of Thomas Creech's translations of Horace, Theocritus, and Lucretius on her poetics. The ensuing chapters concern Behn's response to Rochester's libertine aesthetic, a close reading of On a Juniper-Tree (a poem central to her collection), Katherine Philips as Behn's most important predecessor as a woman writin

Author : Aphra Behn
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 126 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2018-06-19
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1721612750

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The History of the Nun by Aphra Behn Pdf

The History of the Nun The Fair Vow-breaker by Aphra Behn Behn's remarkable work in which she analyzes the retribution of breaking the vows, particularly the religious vows undertaken by nuns. The tale, claimed to be true, focuses on a nun who was lured by the charms of the world into forsaking the nunnery. Fate comes down hard upon her as she has to face the troubles and threats posed by the outside world as well. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

Author : Janet Todd
Publisher : Palgrave
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 1999-04-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0333720202

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Aphra Behn by Janet Todd Pdf

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.

Author : John Skinner
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2017-03-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780230629462

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An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction by John Skinner Pdf

The formal and expressive range of canonic eighteenth-century fiction is enourmous: between them Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne seem to have anticipated just about every question confronting the modern novelist; and Aphra Behn even raises a number of issues overlooked by her male successors. But one might also reverse the coin: much of what is present in these writers will today seem remote and bizarre. There is, in fact, only one novelist from the 'long' eighteenth century who is not an endangered species outside the protectorates of university English departments: Jane Austen. Plenty of people read her, moreover, without the need for secondary literature. These reservations were taken into account in the writing of this book. An Introduction to Eighteenth Century Fiction is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to English fiction from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. It deals with novel criticism, canon formation and relations between genre and gender. The second part of the book contains an extensive discussion of Richardson and Fielding, followed by paired readings of major eighteenth-century novels, juxtaposing texts by Behn and Defoe, Sterne and Smollett, Lennox and Burney among others. The various sections of the book, and even the individual chapters, may be read independently or in any order. Works are discussed in a way intended to help students who have not read them, and even engage with some who never will. The author consumes eighteenth-century fiction avidly, but has tried to write a reader-friendly survey for those who may not.

Author : David Womersley
Publisher : Wiley-Blackwell
Page : 632 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2001-04-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 063121285X

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A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake by David Womersley Pdf

This definitive Companion provides a critical overview of literary culture in the period from John Milton to William Blake. Its broad chronological range responds to recent reshapings of the canon and identifies new directions of study. The Companion is composed of over fifty contributions from leading scholars in the field, its essays offer students a comprehensive and accessible survey of the field from a wide range of perspectives. It also, however, gives researchers and faculty the opportunity to update their acquaintance with new critical and scholarly work. The volume meets the needs of an intellectual world increasingly given over to inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary study by covering philosophical, political, cultural and historical writing, as well as literary writing. Unlike other similar volumes, the main body of the Companion consists of readings of individual texts, both those commonly and less commonly studied.

Author : Jane Spencer
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : English fiction
ISBN : OCLC:610337310

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The Rise of the Woman Novelist by Jane Spencer Pdf

Author : D. Hughes
Publisher : Springer
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2001-02-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780230597709

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The Theatre of Aphra Behn by D. Hughes Pdf

During the nineteen years of her play-writing career, Aphra Behn had far more new plays staged than anyone else. This book is the first to examine all her theatrical work. It explains her often dominant place in the complex theatrical culture of Charles II's reign, her divided political sympathies, and her interests as a free-thinking intellectual. It also reveals her as a brilliant theatrical practitioner, who used the seen as richly and significantly as the spoken.

Author : Dale Spender
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 608 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 1982
Category : Social Science
ISBN : UOM:49015002881572

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Women of Ideas and what Men Have Done to Them by Dale Spender Pdf

While men control knowledge, they are in a position to take women's ideas. If they like them, they use them; if they don't, they lose them. Every fifty years women are required to reinvent the wheel, for every generation of women is initiated into a world in which women's traditions have been denied and buried. The text exposes the inadequacies of much modern (male) scholarship, advocating that women's absence from the record as creative intellectual beings is not women's fault, but men's.

Author : Cynthia Richards,Mary Ann O'Donnell
Publisher : Modern Language Association
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2014-04-04
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781603291712

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Approaches to Teaching Behn's Oroonoko by Cynthia Richards,Mary Ann O'Donnell Pdf

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.

Author : Carla Plasa,Betty J. Ring
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2013-12-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317761921

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The Discourse of Slavery by Carla Plasa,Betty J. Ring Pdf

First published in 1994. The Discourse of Slavery is an innovative collection of fascinating essays addressing the problematic of slavery within literary, cultural and political writings. For the first time, slavery is examined critically within both the British and the American context, and related to contemporary concerns around race and gender. Writers discussed include: Aphra Behn William Blake Mary Wollstonecraft Charlotte Bronte Elizabeth Gaskell Toni Morrison William Faulkner Harriet Jacobs Harriet Beecher Stowe Frederick Douglass The Discourse of Slavery will be an invaluable and intriguing volume for students of literature, gender, race and ethnicity.