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  • Some Current Publications
  • Ben Neudorf

JOSEPH ADDISON

Miller, Stephen. “The Strange Career of Joseph Addison.” Sewanee Review 122.4 (2014): 650–660. Miller offers an overview of criticism and reception of Joseph Addison’s work. He concludes, “Addison’s reputation may rise, but he will never be accorded the same status as Swift and Pope, though he understood the forces shaping Britain better than they did” (660).

APHRA BEHN

Deb, Basuli. “Transnational Complications: Reimagining Oroonoko and Women’s Collective Politics in the Empire.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 36.1 (2015): 33–56. Basuli Deb “argues for the recognition of the ghostly hauntings of a transnational protofeminism in Oroonoko” (40). The connections between Imoinda and Behn are 1) Imoinda’s negotiation of the King’s concubinage and sexual taboos connected to Behn’s negotiation of colonial Patriarchy, and 2) “Imoinda’s unruly womb that decomposes can be likened to Behn’s female pen that composes” (50). Basuli argues that “Instead of leading to an ethnocentrist reading of Oroonoko, this results in a more complex understanding of feminist negotiations across differences through an interpretative lens that offers more dialogic spaces for diverse feminist energies to come together in this century” (51).

Heavey, Katherine. “Aphra Behn’s Oenone to Paris: Ovidian Paraphrase by Women Writers.” Translation & Literature 23.3 (2014): 303–320. Aphra Behn [End Page 205] was attacked for her paraphrase of paraphrase of Ovid’s Heroides 5, Oenone to Paris, which she contributed to Ovid’s Epistles (1680). Katherine Heavey examines the both the political context of Behn’s translation, where, for instance, “she uses the myth of Paris’ abandonment of Oenone to register her alarm at Monmouth’s power, while also, perhaps, tacitly admitting the attraction that he held for so many in England,” and the social contribution Behn’s paraphrase translation had in terms of paving the way for other translations and “politicized adaptation” of classics by female authors.

Pacheco, Anita. “Festive Comedy in The Widdow Ranter: Behn’s Clowns and Falstaff.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 38.2 (2014): 43–61. By tracing Behn’s use of clowns in her ““low” comic plot to reflect on and critique her serious “high” plots, alongside their Shakespearean counterparts, Pacheco argues that Behn’s The Widdow Ranter is less partisan than has previously been thought, complicating characterizations of the play as “uncomplicatedly loyalist” (44). Pecheco argues that “the Falstaff allusions form part of a running commentary through which the “low” comic plot reflects on the serious “high” plots populated by genteel characters preoccupied with honor and statecraft” (49). The result of this mixture of high and low plots is that “Behn presented her audience, which presumably included the king, with a mixed-plot tragicomedy that conjures up a society in all its diversity and complexity and that, rather than peddling a clear-cut partisan message, frustrates the taking of sides” (55).

Women’s Writing 22.1 (2015). Special Issue. Aphra Behn: New Questions and Contexts. Bowditch, Claire and Elaine Hobby, “Introduction: Aphra Behn, New Questions and Contexts;” Adcock, Rachel, “‘Jack Presbyter in his Proper Habit’: Subverting Whig Rhetoric in Aphra Behn’s The Roundheads (1682);” Fowler, Joanna, “Dramatic and Narrative Techniques in the Novellas of Aphra Behn;” Gervitz, Karen, “From Epistle to Epistemology: Love Letters and the Royal Society;” Marshall, Alan, “‘Memorialls for Mrs. Affora’: Aphra Behn and the Restoration Intelligence World;” Overton, Bill, ““From French Verse to English: Behn’s Version of Tallemant’s Le Voyage De L’isle D’Amour (1663);” Villegas-López, Sonia, “‘The Conscious Grove’: Generic Experimentation in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684-87).” The issue explores multiple aspects of Aphra Behn’s dramatic and non-dramatic writing, as well as her involvement in politics, philosophy, and Restoration espionage. (AB)

See also DRAMA (Backscheider, Hermanson, MacNeill); JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER (Ballaster)

ROBERT BOYLE

Intellectual History Review 25.1 (2015). Special Issue. Robert Boyle. Hunter, Michael and Elizabethanne Boran, “Introduction;” Anstey, Peter, “Experimental Pedagogy and the Eclipse of Robert Boyle in England;” Cecon, Kleber, “Robert Boyle’s Experimental [End Page 206] Programme: Some Interesting Examples of the Use of Subordinate Causes in Chymistry and...

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