Broadview Press
2020
The best-known work by Aphra Behn, Oroonoko is an important contribution to the development of the novel in English. Though it predates the British abolition movement by more than a century, it is also an early depiction of the dehumanizing racial violence of slavery; Oroonoko tells of a noble African prince enslaved and taken to Surinam, where he leads a violent revolt of the enslaved. This edition offers helpful annotations, an informative introduction, and contextual materials situating Oroonoko in the context of seventeenth-century slavery and the colonization of Surinam. The early reception of Oroonoko is also documented.
About the Editor
Tiffany Potter
Tiffany Potter works in 18th-century studies. Her arc has included major research projects on libertinism and gender in fiction and theatre; representations of indigenous women in 17th- and 18th-century North American contact and captivity narratives; and women writers in 18th-century England. She also works in television studies, co-editing with CW Marshall an award-winning critical collection on SciFi’s Battlestar Galactica (Bloomsbury 2008), and the first scholarly collection on HBO’s The Wire (Bloomsbury 2009).
Her most recent SSHRC-funded research project generated the 2012 collection, Women, Popular Culture and the Eighteenth Century (UTP). Also with SSHRC support, she has published three critical editions with the University of Toronto Press: Robert Rogers’ 1766 play, Ponteach, or the Savages of America: A Tragedy (2010); Elizabeth Cooper’s 1735 play, The Rival Widows, or Fair Libertine (2013); and Eliza Haywood’s 1724 short novels The Masqueraders and The Surprise (UTP 2015). Her next book project will be Approaches to Teaching the Works of Eliza Haywood with MLA Press.