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Home > ECF > Vol. 17 > Iss. 1 (2004)

 

Abstract

Over the past twenty-five years, revisionist studies of Aphra Behn have illuminated the political subtexts and endeavours in her work. Several scholars have reconciled her Toryism with her feminism, on behalf of modern readers, who may find that type of political juxtaposition harder to comprehend than Behn's contemporaries might have. In the 1990s, Ros Ballaster and Toni Bowers drew on the work of Susan Staves to illuminate how Behn's amatory fictions register contemporary anxiety about the credibility and endurance of oaths of allegiance. More recently, surveys by Janet Todd and Derek Hughes have further contextualized Behn within key Restoration moments (the Popish Plot, the emergence of Whig and Tory partisanship during the Exclusion crisis, and the Glorious Revolution). As efforts to understand Behn's beliefs and constraints move forward, Behn scholarship must better acknowledge the significance of the Low Countries in her work and the importance of that region to the murky political waters that she and her contemporaries navigated.