Some Current Publications

Abstract

Some Current Publications Allison Y. Gibeily JANE BARKER See DELARIVIER MANLEY (Choi) APHRA BEHN Armstrong, Philip. "'Surprising, Rare, Unconceivable': Animal Wonders in the Exotic Tradition." Ariel, vol. 50, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1–24. Armstrong details the use of exotic animals in creating a discourse of wonder, arguing specifically that wonder is not only a "system of meaning, knowledge, or belief," but is more so a "structure of feeling" in which that same knowledge is "held in suspension" (3). Further, he distinguishes between the immediate response of wonder when one encounters a "marvel" and the use of that response to commodify wonderful objects and enlist them in an imperialist, capitalist project. Taking interest in bestiary tales and tracing their presence from classical philosophy to early Christian theology and eventually fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travel narratives, Armstrong then turns to an analysis of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Seeing Behn's menagerie of exotic animals as "a glossy prospectus that invites further investment in plantation agriculture" and all the horrors that come with it, Armstrong's article closes by tracing these same methods in twentieth and twenty-first century novels. Cooper, Karol. "Dice, Jesting, and the 'Pleasing Delusion' of Warlike Love in Aphra Behn's The Luckey Chance." In Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: From Shakespeare to Swift, edited by Holly Faith Nelson and James William Daems, 139-159. Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Cooper's chapter traces the embedded critique of the cuckolding comedy genre and its detrimental social effects in Aphra Behn's play The Luckey Chance. Focusing specifically on the dice game toward the end of the play, [End Page 153] where Sir Cautious wagers a night with his wife Julia against his opponent Gayman, Cooper argues that Behn exposes the danger of likening sexual violence to "diverting games of social warfare" (143). In so doing, Behn proposes a darker, alternative sort of comedy in which emotional pain is present on the stage and borne by all characters involved. Purcell, Carey. From Aphra Behn to Fun Home: A Cultural History of Feminist Theater. Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. Purcell examines the roles that women have played both on and off the stage in her chronological history of feminist theater. Inquiring first and foremost as to how we define feminist theater – whether it is productions by women, about women, or even male-authored works restaged with a feminist bent – Purcell shifts her focus in her second chapter to understand how women writers like Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre capitalized on new laws allowing women to perform on stage to challenge societal expectations during the Restoration. As she argues, these "female wits" complicated the assumed, gendered role of unmarried women, widows, and divorcees. Spencer, Jane. "Behn's Beasts: Aesop's Fables and Surinam's Wildlife in Oroonoko." In Reading Literary Animals, edited by Karen L. Edwards, Derek Ryan, and Jane Spencer, 46-65. New York: Routledge, 2020. Given that Behn wrote captions for a 1687 revised edition of Francis Barlow's Aesop's Fables shortly before publishing Oroonoko in 1688, Spencer outlines how the genre of the fable influenced Behn's descriptions of animals in Surinam. Specifically, by depicting the seventeenth century as a time when "natural history… has not completely eschewed the marvelous" (48), Spencer reimagines the titular character's encounters with animals to be just as much politically charged metaphor as they are scientific description or didactic fable. See also POLITICS & WAR (Hudson); WOMEN WRITERS (Min) ROBERT BOYLE See SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (Remien) JOHN CARLETON See MARY CARLETON (Lucenko) MARY CARLETON Lucenko, Kristina. "'Meerly My Own Free Agent': Liberty and Civility in The Case of Madam Mary Carleton." Early Modern Women 14, no. 1 (2019): 50–74. Lucenko reconsiders Mary Carleton's 1663 pamphlet The Case of Madam Mary Carleton in light of emerging ideas of selfhood and contract from theorists like Hobbes and Locke. As she suggests, Carleton counters her husband John's accusations of bigamy and impersonation by assuming three different "subject positions" in her pamphlet: "Political Carleton," who focuses on mutual obligations of ruler and subject, "Cavalier Carleton," who appeals to courtly culture while simultaneously critiquing it, and "Civil Carleton," who demonstrates a keen understanding of British...