Some Current Publications

Abstract

Some Current Publications Amanda Johnson MARY ASTELL See NON-DRAMATIC LITERATURE (Donovan); PHILOSOPHY (Norton) APHRA BEHN Backscheider, Paula. “From The Emperor of the Moon to the Sultan’s Prison.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 43 (2014): 1–26. Backscheider compares Dryden’s Albion and Albanius (1685) and Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687), arguing that their ostensibly similar spectacles actually pointed to opposing political views, exemplifying how much popular sentiment had changed in two years. Backscheider also locates this intentionality in the farces and spectacles of the late-eighteenth century. Gevirtz, Karen Bloom. Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014. Gevirtz analyzes Behn’s Love-Letters and other early prose fiction to argue that women authors experimented with narrative structure and voice to interrogate how characters know what they know. In the process, they destabilized the “knowing” self that was constructed by masculinist natural philosophers in the Royal Society. Rubik, Margarete. “Women in Arms: Amazons in 17th Century English Drama.” Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts 1.2 (April 2014): 55–63. Surveying Restoration dramatists, including Behn, D’avenant, D’Urfey, Settle, and Shadwell, Rubik argues that plays featuring Amazonian warrior-women [End Page 99] multiplied after the 1670s and that the Amazon was depicted either heroically, negatively, or humorously, depending on the work. This varied portrayal can be attributed to “the Restoration custom of plundering Jacobean plays for adaptation” more than any other political motivation, and in fact the Amazon figure quickly receded from English drama at the beginning of the 1700s. Runge, Laura L. “Constructing Place in Oroonoko” in Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660–1820, ed. Mona Narain and Karen Gevirtz. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 19–32. Runge argues that Behn constructs colonial Surinam, the setting of Oroonoko, as a symbol of fallen Stuart ambitions and as an iteration of the El Dorado myth found in Anglophone Amazonian travel accounts beginning with Sir Walter Raleigh. Southerne’s dramatic adaptation of Behn’s novel, meanwhile, “simplifies the representation of place in the play and presumably accommodates the emotional needs of his audience.” Trull, Mary. “Interest and Retirement in Aphra Behn’s Odes” in Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. 145–71. Trull argues that Behn’s praise poetry—written from the 1670s onward for the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II, James II, and finally Mary II—show a constant negotiation of the hero, the narrator, and the public. Behn depicts her narrator-self as moving in and out of private and public spaces, to juggle private emotions, such as her sorrow over the deposition of James II, with politically correct, public expressions of loyalty, as the political climate changed radically. Zook, Melinda. “Sanctified Sisters: Aphra Behn and the Culture of Nonconformity” in Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660–1714. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. 92–124. Zook recounts Behn’s early interactions with disreputable Dissenter-republican exiles in Surinam and Antwerp, concluding that these rogues shaped Behn’s view of Protestant non-conformity as seditious, hypocritical, and morally bankrupt. Behn’s emergence as a playwright coincided with her emergence as a passionate royalist, where she could use the stage to strip away the Dissenter’s pretense and reveal their ignominy. See also NON-DRAMATIC LITERATURE (Donovan) ROBERT BOYLE Miller, Laura. “Masculinity, Space, and Late Seventeenth-Century Alchemical Practices” in Gender and Space in British Literature 1660–1820, ed. Mona Narain and Karen Gevirtz. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 165–78. Miller offers Isaac Newton’s private practice of alchemy as an alternative to Robert Boyle and the Royal Academy’s practice of science in a public space of “gentlemanly sociability.” Drawing upon theological sources, and applying humoral and sexual metaphors to elements of nature, alchemy had a different spiritual and intellectual significance for each practitioner, who [End Page 100] worked within a space that allowed for a highly individual experience of gender identity. JOHN BUNYAN Davis, Nick. “Hobbes and Bunyan: the Subsuming Individual Vision” in Early Modern Writing and the Privatisation of Human Experience. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 113–42. Davis reads the frontispieces to Leviathan and Bunyan’s A Holy War, arguing that both illustrate a process of mirroring between...