Approaches to Teaching Behn's ed. by Cynthia Richards and MaryAnn O'Donnell (review)

Editors Cynthia Richards and Mary Ann O'Donnell offer a wide-ranging, insightful, and valuable collection with their addition to the MLA's Approaches to Teaching Series. Experienced and new instructors alike will find these essays engaging, not only as resources to use in the classroom, but also as continuations of the rich tradition of scholarship that Behn's Oroonoko has engendered since finding its place firmly in the canon of English literature roughly twenty years ago. Among other benefits, the essays gathered here successfully model the crosscurrents of discussions that both students and teachers have with each other and with Behn's novel.

Divided into two parts—materials and approaches—the book reflects the editors' interest in not separating materials for students and materials for instructors. The former includes general resources that most students of literature will find helpful, as well as a list of the bibliographies, biographies, monographs, articles, maps, and online resources most relevant to the study of Oroonoko and late seventeenth-century writings on race, slavery, and empire. The latter is divided into five categories of approaches or contexts: formal and thematic, cultural, pedagogical, comparative, and authorial. The common link between most of the essays is their acknowledgment that Behn's novel is a complicated and challenging one to teach because of its simultaneous likeness to the literary traditions that come before it, the novelties it offers as what many consider the first novel in English, and the development of literary realism it heralds in the following century after its publication.

As many of the contributors demonstrate, teaching Oroonoko through multiple lenses is often more productive for students, as it allows them to explore such questions as the one Srinivas Aravamudan poses to his students: "What kind of story is this?" (28). This naturally leads to similar questions about truth and credibility, which makes essays by Keith Botelho and James Grantham Turner especially useful in teaching students how to perform close readings and literary analysis.

The essays in the cultural contexts section provide a diverse and fascinating range of approaches that include race, economics, transatlanticism, war, and Caribbean literature. Instructors who teach a diverse student body will especially appreciate Karen Gervitz's essay for its thoughtfulness about how we can rely on students' concerns about money as a way of helping them to think about Behn's "exploration of a commodity-driven world" (68). The moving, trading, buying, and selling of both goods and people is a primary feature of the novel, and Laura Stevens draws attention to how a study of the traffic of women and their writing in the Atlantic world can enrich students' understanding of Oroonoko, especially as it relates to other accounts of slavery, captivity, and women's travel literature (Equiano, Rowlandson, and Cavendish, for example).

Instructors who regularly teach either the first or second half of the British literature survey will find Ana de Freitas Boe's and Ashley Cross's essays exceedingly valuable. The former makes a compelling argument for teaching Behn's novel in the first half of the survey because it allows students to recognize and appreciate the "historicity of ideas about beauty and culture and racial difference" across both genres and time (for example, the Renaissance blazon and Behn's description of Oroonoko's physical beauty). In a similar vein, Cross illustrates the importance of helping students understand the novelties Oroonoko offers, while also foregrounding the dialogue women writers continued to have with their male counterparts throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth-century. Making questions of gender and genre a central concern, Cross demonstrates how instructors can help students think about how we map or survey a literary territory in an inclusive manner "that is historically specific and yet gives voice to all subjects" (117).

The section on comparative contexts will be most useful to instructors who teach Oroonoko from the perspective of courses more broad than the Restoration or British literature survey (for example, early modern...