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Reimagining Royalism in Aphra Behn’s America
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 53, Number 3, Summer 2013
- pp. 499-521
- 10.1353/sel.2013.0034
- Article
- Additional Information
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In The Widdow Ranter (1690) and Oroonoko (1688), Aphra 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. Interconnecting disparate cultural systems and even narrative forms, she condenses a constellation of worldviews on both sides of the Atlantic and warns that English settlements risk their own way of life when they practice cultural hegemony.