Approaches to Teaching Behn’s Oroonoko ed. by Cynthia Richards and Mary Ann O’Donnell (review)

As Ms. Richards and Ms. O’Donnell point out in their preface, Behn’s work engages students and scholars alike with its treatment of complex issues of race, gender, class, and literary history. The addition of this welcome volume on Oroonoko to the MLA’s “Approaches to Teaching” series provides a useful complement to volumes on Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Defoe.

Ms. O’Donnell’s introductory section on “Materials” judiciously covers without bias a critical field of sometimes contradictory interpretations. She surveys sources available on Behn and her work, including scholarly, classroom, and online editions; biographies and bibliographies; scholarly books and articles; and web resources for context on race, slavery, geography, history, and other topics. Ms. Richards’s introduction explains the editors’ efforts to gather information from dozens of scholars and teachers of Oroonoko at colleges and universities around the world to shape this volume’s organization. She points out that the Surinam section of the narrative is “what students typically take to be the real novel,” and this collection largely focuses on Oroonoko’s experience not as a prince, but as a slave.

The short essays in this volume come from 27 different contributors, divided here into: “Formal and Thematic Contexts,” “Cultural Contexts,” “Pedagogical Contexts,” “Comparative Contexts,” and “Authorial Contexts.” They vary widely in method and focus, from abbreviated critical readings to descriptions of day-by-day plans for teaching Oroonoko in a range of curricular, classroom, and institutional settings. The essays that stand out combine pedagogical and interpretive approaches. Srinivas Aravamudan’s “What Kind of Story Is This?” introduces many formal and thematic questions addressed in later essays, supplying twenty different genres in which Oroonoko can be placed, from autobiography and travel narrative to me dieval courtship tale and civil war narrative. By examining how Behn represents speech, Bill Overton provides a framework for using Oroonoko to teach students about close reading and narrative theory. In “Teaching the Contradiction,” James Grantham Turner focuses on using Behn’s truth claims as a basis for teaching critical skills like identifying authorial personae and textual analysis using an electronically searchable text and facsimiles of the original. In one of the most innovative pedagogical plans, Jane Milling and Cynthia Richards describe how they taught Oroonoko along with Southerne’s dramatic adaptation of the work and Behn’s play The Widdow Ranter concurrently in Britain and America; it culminates with students performing scenes for each other on video.

Other essays provide background for new contexts or approaches: Derek Hughes’s reading of “Oroonoko and Blackness,” Karen Gevirtz’s “Economic Oroonoko,” Laura M. Stevens’s “The Traffic of Women: Oroonoko in an Atlantic Framework,” and Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson’s “Writing War in Oroonoko” set the novel in strikingly different lights. The organization emphasizes that one must add context to Oroonoko to teach it; the text requires an external lens. Leslie Richardson’s “Teaching Oroonoko at a Historically Black University” and Erik Bond’s “Teaching the Teachers: Oroonoko as a Lesson in Critical Self-Consciousness” are welcome reminders of the ways students’ frames of reference are shaped by their careers and institutional contexts.

Occasionally there are minor points that readers may find problematic. Some of the literary-historical essays presume a singular definition of “the novel” that is at odds with recent work on eighteenth-century fiction. Rose Zimbardo’s identification of just two styles in Oroonoko (“high heroic” and “low realistic”), although drawing on a long-established line of scholarship, is contradicted by the variety of genres and styles discussed in the other essays. Two of the essays refer without elaboration to societies in Oroonoko as being more or less “primitive” or “advanced” on a sliding scale from Coramantien to Europe. One reference rather puzzlingly cites the 1719 edition of Robinson Crusoe by chapter number. In general, however, the editors have impressively corralled disparate viewpoints into a readable and well-organized book.

The...