Oroonoko

by Aphra Behn

Overview

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, the story of an African prince's enslavement by British colonists and his journey from West Africa to the Caribbean, is the first literary work in English to portray what came to be known as "the triangular trade". This edition features a generous selection of thematically organized historical materials including explorers' descriptions of the "new world" of the Caribbean, planters' accounts of the sugar colonies, firsthand accounts of the slave trade from Dutch and English traders and abducted Africans, and early abolitionist publications by Europeans and former slaves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613824320
Publisher:	Simon & Brown
Publication date:	02/21/2013
Pages:	78
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.16(d)

About the Author

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the first Englishwomen to earn a living from writing. She was a playwright, poet, translator, and fiction writer during the Restoration era. Behn’s plays and writing were well-received by the public, but she often found herself in legal trouble or being judged harshly because critics did not like that she was a successful woman. Behn remained a strong advocate for herself, and argued that women should have the same education opportunities as men, paving the way for more women to become writers.

Table of Contents

Introduction

• Aphra Behn
• Oroonoko

Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave: A True History

In Context

• from Aphra Behn, the Dedication of Oroonoko to Lord Maitland (1688)
• The Invitation to Surinam: Lord Willoughby’s Prospectus
  • from Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, Certain Overtures made by the Lord Willoughby of Parham unto all such as shall incline to plant in the English colony of Surinam on the continent of Guiana (c. 1655)
• On Surinam in the Seventeenth Century
  • from George Warren, An Impartial Description of Surinam upon the Continent of Guiana in America (1667)
• The Restoration Monarchy and the Slave Trade
  • from The Several Declarations of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa (1667)
• Infographic: England’s Slave Trade
• Europeans on Slavery, Gold Coast to Guiana
  • from William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave Trade (1734)
  • from Charles de Rochefort, The History of the Carriby-Islands (1658, English translation 1666)
  • from Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657)
  • from Thomas Tryon, Friendly Advice to Gentleman Planters (1684)
  • from Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, General History of the Antilles Inhabited by the French (1667–71)
• Black Voices on Slavery in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
  • Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787)
  • from Richard Price, First-Time: The Historical Vision of an African American People (1983, second edition 2002)
• Eighteenth-Century Commentaries on Aphra Behn and Oroonoko
  • from Thomas Southerne, dedication to his stage adaptation of Oroonoko (1696)
  • from anonymous, The History of the Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Behn, written by one of the Fair Sex (1698)
  • from The General Dictionary, Historical and Critical (1735)

Editorial Reviews

Including the full text of Aphra Behn's novella , this volume explores its global historical context through a number of literary, philosophical, and historical texts designed to place the work in a literary history as well as a relational history of the three regions the story unites: West Africa, The Caribbean, and England. Documents from each corner of the "Triangular Trade," such as slave trader correspondence, travel accounts from Surinam, and legal decisions concerning slavery in England, combine to add to the richness of this earliest literary narrative written in English about an American colony. Gallagher is an English literature professor at the U. of California, Berkeley. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Tiffany Potter’s excellent edition of Oroonoko arrives at a time when the history of the Atlantic slave trade is being scrutinized anew in both classrooms and the mass media. Potter deftly introduces Behn’s unsettling text and contextualizes it with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century voices that represent the full spectrum of contemporary responses to slavery: from horrifyingly matter-of-fact justifications of European domination to unforgettable firsthand accounts of abduction, enslavement, and brutal mistreatment. I have no doubt that this will be the preferred teaching edition of Oroonoko for years to come.” — Paul Kelleher, Emory University

“Tiffany Potter’s edition of Oroonoko makes this important text accessible to a wide range of readers. The introduction offers a concise biography of Behn as well as an insightful discussion of Oroonoko’s genres and reception. The text itself is helpfully annotated, and the supplemental materials provide essential contexts related to European understandings of Surinam and the slave trade. Potter’s edition will doubtlessly become the standard text for generations of students.” — Christopher D. Johnson, Francis Marion University

“Potter’s edition marshals vital contemporary documents to illuminate the emerging contexts of global trade, enslavement, and colonial racism within which Behn carves her tale. The introduction, as well as gathering the scant information we have about Behn herself, emphasizes the emergence of racialized discourses that were mobilized to justify slavery and the colonial appropriation of distant lands. Potter’s footnotes offer a commentary perfectly pitched to make the strange elements of Oronooko clear to new readers.” — Kerry Sinanan, The University of Texas at San Antonio

”Tiffany Potter's new edition of Oroonoko is an ideal teaching text. In addition to Behn's novel, it offers a wealth of contextual material on Surinam in the seventeenth century, Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the slave trade, and eighteenth-century abolitionist narratives.” — Robert Markley, University of Illinois

“Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is widely viewed as a foundational work of British literature: required reading for anyone interested in the development of the novel in English, early women writers, or the history of race, slavery, and colonialism. It is also dense, complex, and deeply strange; as Potter puts it, ‘truth, history, fiction, and fictionalization cannot be untangled with confidence.’ Potter’s edition does a brilliant job of navigating readers through Behn’s tangled engagements with notions of slavery, race, gender, and social rank, as well as with generic conventions borrowed from romance, the travel narrative, heroic tragedy, and an emerging literary realism. It is especially good at providing context for both Behn herself—the first professional woman writer in English—and her most famous work, with helpful selections from contemporary documents on the English colonization of Surinam, and on the slave trade and slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These are judiciously excerpted, and explained with incisive, crystal clear commentary; Behn’s text is annotated with equal clarity. The edition is perfectly pitched for the undergraduate classroom; it should be accessible to advanced secondary students and appealing for the general reader as well. This will be the preferred teaching text for years to come.” — Heather Keenleyside, University of Chicago

“This new edition provides the essential context to situate Oroonoko within English colonial projects and the English trade in enslaved Africans in the seventeenth century. Additional primary materials include the voices of formerly enslaved people through the writing of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and oral histories of the slavery era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Suriname. … [W]ith contemporary responses to Behn and Oroonoko and a rich, informative introduction, this edition offers an invaluable cultural historical approach to Behn’s challenging novella.” — Mark Vareschi, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Tiffany Potter’s timely new edition of Oroonoko combines an accessible version of Behn’s spellbinding text with a concise, well-chosen set of supplementary materials situating this fiction within the contexts of transatlantic slavery and British empire. Potter has a particularly judicious sense of both the force and limitations of Oroonoko as a document of the slave trade and as a subsequent touchstone for the abolitionist movement. This edition will be an excellent resource for specialized courses but also for general surveys alert to the urgency of these contexts for all literary study now. It will be equally valuable to general readers interested in the global origins of modern English fiction.” — Timothy P. Campbell, University of Chicago

“A good edition for students and researchers alike. Footnotes explain the basic meanings and facts; the text is clearly laid out, then framed with well-curated selections of documents about the Surinam colony and the conditions of slavery. Some of these contextual readings are chilling and some inspiring, some are by white Europeans and some by the descendants of abducted Africans, but they chime with moments in Behn's own text and fix them in the reader's memory. Tiffany Potter's introduction rightly brings out the contradictions that make Oroonoko a vital text in every sense, neither an escapist romance nor an antislavery tract: fragments of both jostle in the mind and heart of the fictional female narrator, at once credulous and skeptical, complicit in the colonial ‘we’ and revolted by it.” — James Grantham Turner, University of California, Berkeley

“Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is a timeless book, one especially important for our times due to its exploration of the intersections of class, race, and gender in the seventeenth century and the legacies of capitalism, slavery, and colonization. Tiffany Potter’s introduction to Behn’s life and the novella’s story deftly untangles the complex layers of genre and seventeenth-century literary trends, politics, commerce, and religion that underwrite Behn’s narrative.” — Mona Narain, Texas Christian University

“The new Broadview edition of Oroonoko will be a valuable resource in a variety of courses, ranging from early modern literature and women’s studies to the history of transatlantic relations and the slave trade. It sheds illuminating light on a Restoration text that, as Potter affirms, offers ‘both emotional impact and intellectual provocation for modern readers.’” — Margarete Rubik, Early Modern Women

From the Publisher

Clare Wille’s performance may help listeners appreciate Behn’s tragic romance despite the story’s seventeenth-century prose. It features the star-crossed love of a noble (and highly emotional) African king who is tricked into slavery. Wille’s pace can be a touch quick, but she aids understanding through her clarity of enunciation and her astute interpretations of emotion, expression, and emphasis. There is some staginess in her reading, but it fits the audiobook’s melodramatic tone; in particular, her cultured-sounding English accent fits the book’s high rhetorical style. She doesn’t overdo it, a choice that helps the text to seem merely ornate and high-flown rather than purple and overwrought. While not for every taste, OROONOKO is a notable piece, and Wille does a fine job of presenting it at its best. W.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2017 - AudioFile