Aphra Behn

The most complete collection of the work of Aphra Behn (1640-89) available, this volume contains Oroonoko and five other works of fiction ranging from comedy and high melodrama to tragedy. The works included--The Fair Jilt, Memoirs of the Court of the King of Bantam, The History of the Nun, The Adventure of the Black Lady, and The Unfortunate Bride--are complemented by a generous selection of her poetry from public political verse to lyrics and witty conversation poems.

These essays focus on gender issues in early modern England as expressed in texts written by and about women.

In Tropicopolitans Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples & cultures subjected to colonial discourse, he makes a case for the agency-or the capacity to resist domination-of those oppressed. Aravamudan's analysis of texts that accompanied European commercial & imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution through the French Revolution reveals the development of anticolonial consciousness prior to the nineteenth century. "Tropicalization" is the central metaphor of this analysis, a term that incorporates both the construction of various dynamic tropes by which the colonized are viewed & the site of the study, primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those subaltern people who bear & resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In readings that expose new relationships between literary representation & colonialism in the eighteenth century, Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe & Captain Singleton, Addison's Cato, & Swift's Gulliver's Travels & The Drapier's Letters. He extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson's Rasselas, Beckford's Vathek, Montague's travel letters, Equiano's autobiography, Burke's political & aesthetic writings, & Abbe de Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes. Offering a radical approach to literary history, this study provides new mechanisms for understanding the development of anticolonial agency. Introducing eighteenth-century studies to a postcolonial hermeneutics, Tropicopolitans will interest scholars engaged in postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, & literary theory.

M. L. Stapleton is Professor of English and teaches courses in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, bibliography and methods, and the civilizations and cultures of the ancient world at Stephen F. Austin State University.

In the early eighteenth-century the household accountant was traditionally female, they were also associated with literary and narrative accounting, inherent in diaries and letters. This text examines the development of the early novel.

Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century Theatre provides a comprehensive examination of this aesthetic theory. The author investigates this aesthetic history as a form of artistic creation, philosophical investigation, a way of representing and manipulating ideas about gender and a way of acknowledging, reinforcing and making a critique of social values for the still and moving, the permanent and elapsing. The book's analysis covers the entire seventeenth-century with chapters on the work of Ben Jonson, John Milton, the pamphletheatre, Aphra Behn, John Vanbrugh and Jeremy Collier and will be of interest to scholars in the areas of literary and performance studies.