Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave: A Critical Edition (review)

Many critics consider Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) the first anti‐slavery narrative. England's first professional woman writer, Behn left a literary legacy divided between recognition of Oroonoko by abolitionists and rejection of her reputation for indecency. In her novel Aphra Behn (1849), the German author Luise Mühlbach joins these disparate strands of Behn reception. She adapts Behn's slave story within the historical context of nineteenth‐century abolitionism, and she reinterprets Behn's biography and controversial literary reputation, transforming Behn into a respectable female literary predecessor. Mühlbach's text asserts a specifically female authorial legitimacy and challenges male dominance in social relations and in literary culture. Drawing on post‐colonial cultural criticism, this essay examines Mühlbach's alterations of Behn's Oroonoko, focusing on the racial and gendered dynamics of power in the white female protagonist's relationship to the black slave couple and to male colonial authority. Although Mühlbach employs a more modern anti‐racist discourse than Behn, Aphra's position remains implicated with the colonial order, and while the black woman Imoinda gains in agency, she lacks the autonomous subjectivity of Aphra and Oroonoko. In her larger project of recuperating Behn's literary reputation, Mühlbach privileges the white European woman's subjectivity against the background of the black woman as ‘other’.

Oroonoko and its critical reception Recent criticism of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko has attempted to untangle its complex web of political and ideological investments, an approach encouraged by the novel's representation of the seventeenth-century English colonial project that in many significant ways has shaped the modern world. Set in Coramantien on the coast of Africa and in an English colony in Surinam, Oroonoko tells the story of an African prince captured into slavery by an unscrupulous English slave-ship captain. Prince Oroonoko had befriended the captain when selling slaves to him; the prince thought he was a guest on the ship, but the captain saw him as a potential commodity. When they arrive in the Caribbean, Oroonoko becomes a paradoxical 'royal slave': the other slaves bow down before him as their king (even though he may have traded some of them into their current slavery); the English, who also recognize his nobility, keep him in an elegant plantation house, guarded and entertained by the novel's narrator. The English promise, but never deliver, freedom for Oroonoko and his wife Imoinda. Oroonoko's royalty means that he does not suffer the usual hardships of slavery; still, he longs for release. Imoinda's pregnancy brings the narrative to a crisis over the fate of their child: Oroonoko leads a rebellion to secure their liberty, but it fails due to the lack of resolve among the other slaves. The wives beg their husbands to stop fighting; as in Oroonoko’s story, domestic interests compete with the defence of honour.)

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British Literary Bibliography, 1970-1979 is a ten-year supplement to the six volumes already published in the prestigious series Index to British Literary Bibliography, and is fully indexed for consistency with earlier volumes. The series provides a comprehensive record of the writings that describe and study the history of the printed book in Britain, and works of bibliography and textual criticism, from the earliest times. The period covered by the present volume was bibliographically very active, witnessing a great renewal of interest in the history of the book. The volume has seven main sections: 'General Bibliographies of and Guides to British Literature', 'Bibliography and Textual Criticism', 'General and Period Bibliography', 'Regional Bibliography', 'Book Production and Distribution', 'Forms, Genres, and Subjects', and 'Authors'. Complete information about each book or journal article is provided in standard form, and in many instances objective annotations are given, affording additional access to the items through a very detailed index.

This article attempts to explore the interrelationships of region and class in two English novels of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The texts used for discussion are Aphra Behn's Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688) and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale (1800). Behn uses Africa and South America to unfold the grisly tale of a black prince/slave and to build up the relation of region and class to Oroonoko's life and transformation. Edgeworth sets the scene in Ireland to illustrate various kinds of tension between the ruling Anglo-Irish and the Irish. Moreover, Oroonoko is told from the perspective of an observant English woman whereas an old Irish steward's point of view is used to trace the rise and fall of his four Anglo-Irish masters in Castle Rackrent. These intriguing relationships of region and class, as complicated more by peculiar narrative stances, are dealt with thoroughly in this article.

M. Etienne, in his study of the sources of Victor Hugo's first novel, Bug-Jargal, suggests that a kinship clearly exists between this, as well as earlier French stories of Negro characters, and Mrs. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave. He is led to this conclusion because of certain indications of the popularity of Oroonoko in France during the eighteenth century, and because of the recurrence in French literature of the noble, romantic Negro. This very just inference as to the importance of Oroonoko is worthy of elaboration and emphasis because in this early English novel we can find the substance and technique of much of the littérature négrophile of the eighteenth century, a period in which the Negro emerges from his despised condition and takes on heroic qualities and possibilities; and also because this English story, of which the purpose might well have been didactic, written by “the first literary abolitionist … on record in the history of fiction,” as Swinburne called Mrs. Behn, was to have far-reaching consequences in French humanitarian thought.

Reviewed by: The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition ed. by Amber K. Regis Richard A. Kaye (bio) The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, edited by Amber K. Regis; pp. xx + 587. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, £79.69, £27.99 paper, $100.00, $39.99 paper. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, edited by Amber K. Regis, indirectly highlights one of the ironies of Victorian literary history as it intersected with the history of sexual attitudes—namely, that, while Oscar Wilde is the nineteenth-century British writer who today is most associated with the candid expression of male same-sex desire, the writer of the era who actually bequeathed to posterity the most self-revealing account of homosexuality is John Addington Symonds, author of the largely forgotten seven-volume The Renaissance in Italy (1875), now out-of-print biographies of Michelangelo and Walt Whitman, and posthumously published Memoirs (1984). This edition reproduces the latter text, written over a four-year period between 1889 and 1893 and detailing Symonds’s conflicted feelings for other men and his academic and literary ambitions. Symonds’s Memoirs reveal boyhood ordeals, erotic obsessions, and illicit adult relationships that do not so much deviate from conventional married life as uneasily consort with it. “I have written things you would not like to read,” Symonds once informed his wife, Catherine, as if the act of writing were the primary transgression and not the sexual illicitness that the Memoirs so meticulously detailed (17). A friend of Edward Lear, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Sidgwick family, Benjamin Jowett, Edmund Gosse, Leslie Stephen, and Margot Asquith, as well as a father of four daughters, Symonds held a central place in Victorian letters. Yet it is his Memoirs, with their revelations of a robust and secret erotic life as the lover of men, which have the greatest claim on contemporary attention. Unsealed in 1949, they were first published by Random House in 1984 in a handsome trade edition edited by Symonds’s earliest twentieth-century biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, whose 1964 The Woeful Victorian: A [End Page 691] Biography of John Addington Symonds was an earnestly psychoanalytic attempt at understanding Symonds’s erotic conundrums. That Grosskurth was only permitted to paraphrase passages from the Memoirs indicates how incendiary his descendants (and the London Library, to which Symonds’s first biographer Horatio Brown bequeathed the manuscript) considered its contents. While Grosskurth’s 1984 edition claimed to reproduce four-fifths of the manuscript held in the British Library, Sarah J. Heidt revealed in a 2003 article in Victorian Studies that Grosskurth in fact had excluded about a third—53,000 of some 160,000 words (what Grosskurth characterized as “execrable poetry and . . . self-conscious nature descriptions”) (The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, Grosskurth, edited by Phyllis Grosskurth [Random House, 1984], 11). Heidt worried that the complex “heterogeneity” of the manuscript—which includes early letters and diary entries, some corrected in ink or pencil, several of them pasted in—was occluded in the 1984 edition, a problem exasperated by Grosskurth’s failure to indicate through ellipses where excisions were made (“‘Let JAS words stand’: Publishing John Addington Symonds’s Desires,” Victorian Studies 46.1 [2003], 14). Heidt argued, too, that Grosskurth was fixated on a conception of Symonds as harboring a true, “internal nature” and thus was inattentive to the many ways in which his sense of self was shaped by the views of others (19). In her introduction, the editor of the new edition, Amber K. Regis, acknowledges the force of Heidt’s critique but also stresses that “incompleteness is an essential feature of the Memoirs” even though it is the first to reproduce the surviving manuscript, given that there are missing pages (16). With its informative critical commentary, extensive notes, illuminating appendices, and photographs of several manuscript pages as well as of Symonds’s family, friends, and at least one lover, the version edited by Regis is a superb, editorially expansive edition. The appendices go especially far in enhancing one’s understanding of Symonds, particularly his history of his erotic life that appeared in Sexual Inversion (1896), his account of the...

British Literary Bibliography, 1970-1979 is a ten-year supplement to the six volumes already published in the prestigious series Index to British Literary Bibliography, and is fully indexed for consistency with earlier volumes. The series provides a comprehensive record of the writings that describe and study the history of the printed book in Britain, and works of bibliography and textual criticism, from the earliest times. The period covered by the present volume was bibliographically very active, witnessing a great renewal of interest in the history of the book. The volume has seven main sections: `General Bibliographies of and Guides to British Literature', `Bibliography and Textual Criticism', `General and Period Bibliography', `Regional Bibliography', `Book Production and Distribution', `Forms, Genres, and Subjects', and `Authors'. Complete information about each book or journal article is provided in standard form, and in many instances objective annotations are given, affording additional access to the items through a very detailed index.

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The Spread of Novels: Translations and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century

David Mackenzie was born in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire. As his surname and perhaps even his temperament suggest, the ancestry of his family was Scottish. He attended Brighton Grammar School. In a characteristically forthright interview given in October 2013 to Cuttings, the online journal of the Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland, he explained that he had originally intended to go on to study photography, but was pushed by the school and, even more firmly, by his mother in the direction of university:I decided that I wanted to take Romance Linguistics (or Spanish and Arabic at Edinburgh), having loathed literature at my Brighton Grammar school. [...] Edinburgh and Birmingham rejected me, but then I was called for interview at Cambridge, and this time I rejected them on the grounds that they didn't do a year abroad.In the meantime, David had spent seven weeks in the summer of 1960 at the home of his Galician penfriend in rural Mosteiro de Meis, an experience that marked the beginning of what was to be a deep, lifelong relationship with the language and culture of that region.In the end, he matriculated at Keble College, Oxford, in 1962, 'They charitably gave me a place on the strength of my performance in the Scholarship Exam., but no Scholarship, unfortunately'.The humane attitude towards students that characterized him as a teacher was largely a matter of his own personality, but also owed not a little to his formation at Oxford in the early 1960s. In the interview, when asked who his most inspirational teacher there had been, David replied:Fred Hodcroft [...], because whenever I dried up in the one-to-one tutorials because I'd written the paper I was to read out to him overnight, he would fill in the gap by explaining the different sensations to be derived from smoking the pipe or the cigarette or the hazards of being a rear gunner on a plane (Mosquito, I think, but do they have a rear gunner?) in the far east, fighting the Japs.After taking a BA Honours degree in Spanish in 1966, he worked as Assistant Keeper of Printed Books in the British Library from 1970 to 1974.In 1975 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Nottingham for a thesis entitled 'A Critical Edition with Linguistic and Historical Introduction of the Coronica de Santa Maria de Iria' (a mid-15th-century Galician chronicle tracing the history of the diocese of Iria). The Chronicle pays special attention to the period of the first Archbishop of Santiago, Diego Xelmirez (1068/70-1136), whose name David latterly incorporated into his email address, much to the mystification of the uninitiated.From 1974 until 1986 he was lecturer in Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Ulster at Coleraine, and an enthusiastic member of its men's hockey team.He lectured at the University of Birmingham between 1986 and 1996, before taking up the Chair of Spanish at University College Cork in 1996, a position he held until his retirement in 2008. Ireland suited his temperament and he proved to be an engaging and energetic Head of Department, securing additional posts, reinvigorating medieval and linguistic studies, generally expanding horizons, particularly the department's range of external (and internal) connections and relationships, and playing a key role in establishing the Irish Centre for Mexican Studies.David's research interests lay in the fields of Medieval Spanish Literature, especially the works of Juan Rodriguez del Padron and the Sentimental Romance; the editing of Medieval Castilian, Galician and Aragonese texts; and Lexicography. …

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“Måske vil vi engang glædes ved at mindes dette”. Om Giacomo Castelvetros håndskrifter i Det Kongelige Bibliotek

Reviewed by: Mélodies et duos, Volume 1, Premières mélodies: 1861–1875 by Gabriel Fauré, and: Vocalises by Gabriel Fauré, and: Complete Songs, Volume 1: 1861–1882 by Gabriel Fauré, and: Complete Songs, Volume 1: 1861–1882 by Gabriel Fauré Mary Dibbern Gabriel Fauré. Mélodies et duos, Volume 1, Premières mélodies: 1861–1875. Édition critique établie par Mimi S. Daitz et Jean-Michel Nectoux. (Musica Gallica.) Paris: J. Hamelle, worldwide dist. by Alphonse Leduc, 2010. [Acknowledgements in Fre., Eng., p. iii–iv; pref. in Fre., Eng., p. vii–xii; plates, p. xiii–xviii; score, p. 1–127; song texts in Fre., Eng., p. 129–52; editorial principles in Fre., Eng., p. 153–66; crit. notes in Fre., p. 167–206. ISMN 979-0-2307-9729-0; pub. no. HA 9 729. €60.79.] Gabriel Fauré. Vocalises. Voice and Piano = Chant et piano = Singstimme und Klavier. Critical edition by = Édition critique de = Kritische Ausgabe von Roy Howat, Emily Kilpatrick. First edition = Première publication = Erstveröffentluchung. London: Peters Edition Ltd., 2013. [Introd. by François Le Roux, p. iii; plate, p. v; pref. in Eng., Fre., Ger., p. vi–xiii; list of progressive musical challenges in Eng., Fre., Ger., p. xiv; contents with ranges, tempos, dates, p. xv; score, p. 2–35; appendix 1, unattributed vocalises probably by Fauré, p. 36–48; appendix 2, dictations, p. 49–51; crit. commentary in Eng., p. 52–56; chronological index, p. 57; ISMN 979-0-57700-445-7 (back cover), ISMN 979-0-014-11441-1 (title page verso); pub. no. EP 11385. $19.96.] Gabriel Fauré. Complete Songs, Volume 1: 1861–1882. Medium Voice = voix moyennes = mittlere Stimme. 34 songs for voice and piano = 34 mélodies pour chant et piano = 34 Lieder für Singstimme und Klavier. [End Page 221] Critical edition by = Édition critique de = Kritische Ausgabe von Roy Howat & Emily Kilpatrick. London: Peters Edition Ltd., 2014. [Plates, p. iv–v; general pref., and pref. to vol. 1 in Eng., Fre., Ger., p. vi–xxv; index with ranges, p. xxvi–xxvii; song texts in Fre., Eng., Ger., and Tuscan, p. xxviii–xli; bibliog., p. xlii; score, p. 1–127; table of known chronology and dedicatees in Eng., p. 128–29; crit. commentary in Eng., p. 130–51; appendix, p. 152. ISMN 979-0-014-11761-0; pub. no. EP 11391b. $26.53.] Gabriel Fauré. Complete Songs, Volume 1: 1861–1882. High Voice = voix élevées = hohe Stimme. 34 songs for voice and piano = 34 mélodies pour chant et piano = 34 Lieder für Singstimme und Klavier. Critical edition by = Édition critique de = Kritische Ausgabe von Roy Howat & Emily Kilpatrick. London: Peters Edition Ltd., 2014. [Plates, p. iv–v; general pref., and pref. to vol. 1 in Eng., Fre., Ger., p. vi–xxv; index with ranges, p. xxvi–xxvii; song texts in Fre., Eng., Ger., Tuscan, p. xxviii–xli; bibliog., p. xlii; score, p. 1–127; table of known chronology and dedicatees in Eng., p. 128–29; crit. commentary in Eng., p. 130–51; appendix, p. 152. ISMN 979-0-014-11760-3; pub. no. EP 11391a. $26.53.] In recent years since the end of the extension of copyright for Gabriel Fauré’s works, his mélodies have been the subject of two critical editions, published by Hamelle and Peters. Jean-Michel Nectoux and Mimi S. Daitz prepared Hamelle’s Mélodies et duos, volume 1, Premières mélodies 1861–1875, which begins with Le papillon et la fleur (1861), the composer’s first romance, and ends with Au bord de l’eau of 1875. Roy Howat and Emily Kilpatrick have completed the first volumes of Peters’s Gabriel Fauré, Complete Songs with Volume 1: 1861–1882 (high- and medium-voice versions), and also edited the premiere publication of all of Fauré’s accompanied Vocalises, forty-five in total, only one of which, the well-known Vocalise-Etude of 1907, had been intended for publication. In their preface to the Vocalises, Howat and Kilpatrick explain that these mostly short exercises were written between 1906 and 1916 when Fauré was the director of the Paris Conservatoire. Although they were originally intended for use in sight...