17th-century and Restoration Literature

Aphra Behn, now becoming recognized as a major Restoration figure, is especially significant as an early example of a successful professional woman writer: an important and often troubling role-model for later generations of women. This book shows that her influence on 18th-century literature was far-reaching. Because literary history was (and to an extent still is) based on notions of patrilineal succession, it has been difficult to recognize the generative work of women's texts among male writers. This book suggests that Behn had 'sons' as well as ‘daughters’ and argues that we need a feminist revision of the notion of literary influence. Behn's reputation was very different in different genres. The book analyses her reception as a poet, a novelist, and a dramatist, showing how reactions to her became an important part of the creation of the English literary canon.

This book considers this concept: narrative moves. Stories migrate from one culture to another, over vast distances sometimes, but their path is often difficult to trace and obscured by time. This book looks at the traffic of narrative between Orient and Occident in the 18th century, and challenges the assumption that has dominated since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) that such traffic is always one-way. Eighteenth-century readers in the West came to draw their mental maps of oriental territories and distinctions between them from their experience of reading tales ‘from’ the Orient. In this proto-colonial period the English encounter with the East was largely mediated through the consumption of material goods such as silks, indigo, muslin, spices, or jewels, imported from the East, together with the more ‘moral’ traffic of narratives about the East, both imaginary and ethnographic. Through analyses of fictional representations (including travellers' accounts, letter narratives such as Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, and popular sequences of tales such as the Arabian Nights Entertainments) of four oriental territories (Persia, Turkey, China, and India), this book demonstrates the ways in which the East came to be understood as a source of story, a territory of fable and narrative.

Force or Fraud—rape or seduction? This book examines the development, between the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the accession of George III in 1760, of the peculiarly modern habit of making that distinction on the basis of female responsive agency. It tells the story of how rape and seduction came to be distinguished according to measures of women's resistance and consent in low-brow “amatory” writing, and how at the same time amatory fictions interrogated the implications of their own procedures, implications still very much with us today. The amatory tales of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson—early pioneers in British prose fiction—were immensely popular in their day. But they were also scandalous and controversial, not least because they so often depicted innocent young women under assault from men in positions of legitimate authority over them. Focusing on an ideologically-inflected strategy it calls “collusive resistance,” This book demonstrates that formulaic late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century seduction stories wielded a surprising degree of power and influence—not only over female imaginations, publication lists, and leisure time, but also over the interpretation of one of the age's most troubling problems: the problem of constructing virtuous resistance to those in authority. Stories about the ambiguous seductions of young women helped British political subjects to negotiate a period of dramatic change and uncertainty, and to imagine newly legitimate forms of resistance.

Between the Civil War and the early decades of the 18th century, English poets of the first rank devoted more of their time and creative energies to translating than they had ever done before or have ever done since. This book studies this golden age of poetic translation in England, and has as its organising principle and object of inquiry the significances of translating itself as a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct. The book is composed of case studies of the five principal poet-translators of the period: John Denham, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope. Its argumentative method is metaphorical. Each chapter traces the influence on the theory and practice of the poet at issue exerted by a metaphor or group of metaphors broadly current in contemporary translation discourse: in particular, figurations of the translator as an exile, as a child, as a disseminator of secrets, and as a slave; and comparisons of translation to friendship, sexual congress, metamorphosis, and trade. These figurations challenged Denham, Vaughan, Cowley, Dryden, and Pope to find new answers to questions integral to their understandings of themselves and the standing of the poet in their culture: questions about vocation and career, fame and happiness, responsibility and freedom. Translating changed the direction of the lives of five of the major poets of the period in English literary history which witnessed the transition between early-modern and modern estimations of ‘the poet's life’.