defoe behn

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  • Created by: HCLS
  • Created on: 17-05-15 14:00
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  • DEFOE AND BEHN
    • Watt: Rise of the Novel
      • circumstantial view
      • subjectivity, intensified consciousness, selfhood
      • ordinary individual
      • EMPIRE + THE NOVEL GENRE
        • IRONIC focalism/construction of (British) subject
          • RC ISLAND Control = Self-mastery
            • space for self-reflexivity/narcissism
              • 28 years' isolation
              • Journal: Puritan self-confession narrative
                • centralise individual everyday experience
              • Hulme footprint threatening
            • Lord/sovereign of manor
          • Blaut: Eurocentric diffusionism/Spatial elitism
            • Constructself-image through interaction with the Other
              • Novak: naming
                • assimilation into Europeannarrative
          • stable, coherent identity vs vastness of globe/relative importance
    • CAPITALISM/MC INDIVIDUAL
      • Crusoe commercial traveller
        • exile > governor = MC work ethic
          • self-made man: capitalistic enterpriser
      • Behn: Catholic Royalist Tory
        • anti-modern/anti-bourgeois
          • MC colonial offenders: Byam
        • Charles I political allegory 'royal slave'
          • Divine Right of Kings/insincere abolitionist stance
  • BEHN'S ROMANCE TRADITION/ANTI-MODERN REBELLION
    • Oroonoko: aristocratic characters over everyday individual, high inborn lovers, nobility and royal power
      • Oroondates (La Calprenede's17th century Cassandra) Scythian Prince as romantic lover
    • Looks backwards to nostalgic past (anti-modern)
      • Spengemann: "sought to make place for her antique ideals in the hated modern world"
      • Link: Watt believes Behn 'made no significant contribution to the development of the [novel] form
    • rejects the everyday experience, subjectivity
      • zero-focalised omniscient narrative/not dependent on human subject or identity
      • romance relies on the objective, eternal moral order of things
        • Oroonoko's natural and inherent aristocracy though he's extremely black: nobility traverses the specific
    • BTR Surinam/true 'History', observed anthropology of artefacts (flora, fauna) and human perception  of 'New World'
      • anthropology concerned with 'novel' phenomena
      • quickly disbanded before Coramantien romance
  • BEHN: AUTHORITY OF WHITE FEMALE NARRATOR
    • writes self out of colonial horror
    • colonial mastery through the construct of relative value of female bodies based on race
      • 'consolidates womanhood, whiteness and Englishness simultaneously'
      • belongs to men/phsyically deconstructed through Behn's words
        • narrator lacks father husband
          • takes her body out of economicand sexual circulation

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