Some Current Publications

Aphra Behn

Holmesland, Oddvar. Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013. This book explores the ways in which Behn and Cavendish’s versions of utopian futures avoid fixed positions and instead explore “areas in between, seeking mediating solutions through ‘utopian negotiations.’” Their approach to gender relations, for example, calls for more equality while also promoting “a femininity with heroic resources.”

Pacheco, Anita. “‘Little Religion’ but ‘Admirable Morals’: Christianity and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” Modern Philology 111.2 (2013): 253-280. This article explores the relationship between Behn’s freethinking and her politics. Specifically, Pacheco “explore[s] the treatment of Christianity and honor” in Oroonoko, which “in turn produces a radical questioning of the social value of Christianity directed in part at the conduct of a king identified overwhelmingly with his zeal for the Roman Catholic faith.”

Pfeiffer, Loring. “‘Some for this Faction cry, others for that’: Royalist Politics, Courtesanship, and Bawdry in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Part II.” Restoration 37.2 (2013): 3-19. While The Rover, Part I is often celebrated for its “celebration of desiring women,” Pfeiffer explains that The Rover, Part II is much more ambiguous. Pfeiffer argues that this “ambivalent treatment of female sexuality is bound up in sexual politics,” and that, as a play written during the height of the Exclusion Crisis, it should be read as one that “supports a particular, politically expedient version of female desire.”

Renen, Denys van. “Reimagining Royalism in Aphra Behn’s America.” SEL 53.3 (2013): 499-521. This article contends that in The Widow Ranter and Oroonoko, Behn “grafts Amerindian representational systems onto a Royalist world-view, suggesting that they can reinvigorate a culture tainted by the Interregnum and the political turmoil that plagues the Stuarts’ reign.” In so doing, Renen argues that Behn’s larger point is to warn “that English settlements risk their own way of life when they practice cultural hegemony.”

Richards, Cynthia. “Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25.4 (2013): 647-676. Richards argues against the commonly held notion that the final scene of Oroonoko ought to be read as an instance of martyrdom. Rather, drawing upon current scholarship on judicial torture, Richards argues that the scene “emerges as a closer in its rhetorical aims” in which “Behn deliberately produces a body in pain in order to give legitimacy to the truth of her own narrative.”

Runge, Laura L. “Aphra Behn Online: The Case for Early Modern Open-Access Publishing.” JEMCS 13.4 (2013): 104-121. In this article, Runge, as a representative for Aphra Behn Online, an open-access online journal, discusses the variety of experiences that ABO has run into since launching in 2011. She also talks through the range of views that exist on topics such as peer reviewing and commons areas for open-access online journals. Given that “[t]he idea of free redistribution of scholarship violates traditional forms of copyright,” Runge expounds ABO’s commitment “to the practice of the free circulation of knowledge.”

Song, Eric B. “Love and Substitution: John Milton, Aphra Behn, and the Political Theology of Conjugal Narratives.” ELH 80.3 (2013): 681-714. While most scholars contend that Milton and Behn “write from starkly opposed political positions at different moments of upheaval in seventeenth-century England,” this article argues that they each “define conjugal love precisely as a rejection of substitutes.” By pointing this out, Song is able to suggest that “the resulting ambivalence” from such a definition puts “affective pressure on political and theological economies relying on the fungibility of persons, including hereditary succession and Christian atonement.”

Robert Boyle

See: RACE/ETHNICITY (Malcolmson)

Anne Bradstreet

Arsić, Branka. “Brain-ache: Anne Bradstreet on Sensing.” ELH 80.4 (2013): 1009-1043. Considering that “[t]he brain is an obsessive topic in Anne Bradstreet’s poetry,” Arsić “examines the physiology of sensing” in Bradstreet’s poetry and argues that “the brain is thinking insofar as it is constituted by thoughts and sensations it generates within itself.”

See POETRY (Wright)

John Bunyan

Alff, David. “Why No One Can...