Some Current Publications

APHRA BEHN

Bell, Maureen. “‘Literary pimping’ or Business as Usual? Aphra Behn and the Book Trade.” Women’s Writing, vol. 27, no. 3, 2020, pp. 275–293. Bell explores the influence of gender on Aphra Behn’s literary career by examining her relationship with publishers and the capitalist practices of the book trade industry both during her lifetime and in the decade after her death. Central to Bell’s examination is the question of whether or not Behn and her literary works were treated differently by publishers because of her gender. After providing a concise but detailed look at the legal and commercial operations of the book trade during the Restoration period, Bell emphasizes that Behn’s work appeared in print when a number of women were involved in many different aspects of the London book trade, from printing to bookselling. Through her examination of Behn imprints alongside the imprints of some of her literary predecessors and contemporaries, Bell persuasively argues that Behn’s publishers were not “a bunch of literary pimps,” (283) who exploited writers along gendered lines. Rather, Bell presents Behn not as a victim of sexual degradation, but as an author who “understood the market for her work” (287) under the pervasive capitalist realities of the Restoration book trade.

Rahman, Arifa Ghani. “Negotiating Masculine Circles: Female Agency in Aphra Behn’s Work.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 12, no. 4, 2020, pp. 1–9. Rahman explores the agency of the women in Aphra Behn’s work, specifically her play The Rover. Although some amount of female agency can be seen through strong, active women in earlier plays by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Rahman argues that those playwrights never “yield complete power to them” (3). Behn’s work differs from that of her notable predecessors, Rahman posits, because “Behn’s women take care of themselves and each other” (4), especially when forced marriage or patriarchal economic control is involved. However, Rahman traces Behn’s utilization of masks, crossdressing, and disguises in her work as a way to render female liberation or empowerment only temporary, which limits the possibilities for female agency in her work. Rahman argues that such a depiction of female agency in plays like The Rover responds to Behn’s own anxieties about her economic dependence on masculine literary circles.

Rubik, Margarete. “Excess and Artifice: The Depiction of the Emotions in Aphra Behn’s Amatory Fiction.” Women’s Writing, vol. 27, no. 3, 2020, pp. 377–392. Rubik considers the role of excessive (and non-gendered) passions in the works of Aphra Behn from a stylistic perspective. Rather than examining theories of emotions applicable to later eighteenth-century texts, such as the cult of sensibility, Rubik turns to Thomas Hobbes and the late seventeenth century’s “time of transition between a libertine and a more moderate Epicurean ethos,” which Behn’s writing was situated in the middle of (379). While her men and women are written to have hyperbolic emotions, rendering them breathless as if they are the victims of overpowering passions, Rubik argues Behn’s characters simultaneously use their excessive emotional ranges to both rhetorical and strategic ends. Rubik concludes that her fiction “authenticates the affective states described by a breathless syntax of emotional turmoil, yet is, in fact, written with extreme artifice which renders a clear distinction between the fake and the real impossible” (389). Such a diverse, multi-layered treatment of passions and their wide range of effects had a considerable amount of influence on later writers, such as Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood.

Stephenson, Joseph F. and Darren Freebury-Jones. “A New Source for Two Aphra Behn Plays: The Dutch Lady, A Restoration Comedy in Manuscript.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 33, no. 2–3, 2020, pp. 228–233. Stephenson and Freebury-Jones consider the anonymously authored manuscript play The Dutch Lady as a source text for Aphra Behn’s plays The Roundheads; or, The Good Old Cause and The City Heiress; or, Sir Timothy Treat-all. Using a digital plagiarism detector named WCopyfind, as well as their own close readings of the...