Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko | William C. Spengemann (essay date 1984)
William C. Spengemann (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: "The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 38, No. 4, March, 1984, pp. 384–414.
[In the following excerpt, Spengemann argues that Behn's efforts to create a novel popular with the public resulted in a noteworthy and remarkable work.]
Reading Oroonoko, as we necessarily do, in the light of all the prose fiction produced over the last three centuries, we tend automatically to think of Behn's work as a novel and then, with Clarissa and Moby-Dick and Ulysses in mind, to dismiss it as a very imperfect example of the genre. Although perhaps unavoidable, this ahistorical view begs its own question: why should we so readily attach the name "novel" to a work written at a time when the various things we understand by that word—the form itself, the world it describes, its peculiar language, the readership to whom it...
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