Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter: Theatrical Heroics in a Strange New World
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Barbara Korte
Abstract
Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter (written 1687 or 1688) reacts to the crisis surrounding James II and the demise of the Stuart dynasty which Behn had supported during her entire writing career. In her last play, however, Behn develops a political vision that appears to depart from her earlier royalism, and to this purpose makes special, genre-bending use of the conventions of the heroic play that had been en vogue during the early years of the Restoration. The Widow Ranter is an unusual tragicomedy that accords both its comic and its tragic plot a heroic inflection. It is therefore proposed that a reading of The Widow Ranter through the lens of heroism, and more specifically through the conventions of heroic drama, can shed a fresh light on the vision of political authority that Behn projected at the end of her play, her career and the Stuart era. That her inspection of political authority is set in the colony of Virginia enables Behn to adopt a distancing perspective on the turmoils of late-Stuart England, and also establishes a strong generic link with the heroic drama and its preference for exotic settings.
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© 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter: Theatrical Heroics in a Strange New World
- “Schlafrock und Pantoffeln! Not that! Never!” – Glimpses of Germany in Joseph Conrad’s Non-Fiction
- “What are you like to come home to?” Domesticity in Postwar British Women’s Poetry and Fiction, 1945–1960
- Partition in the Private Sphere: Family Narratives as Vehicles for the Trauma of National History in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day and Irina Liebmann’s Die freien Frauen
- Chris Womersley’s Bereft: Ghosts that Dwell on the Margins of Traumatic Memory
- Reviews
- Don Ringe and Joseph F. Eska. Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-First Century Reintegration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xiii + 313 pp., 11 figures, 77 tables, £ 22.99/$ 39.99.
- Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen and Inge Særheim (eds.). Language Contact and Development around the North Sea. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 321. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2012, xvi + 235 pp., € 105.00/$ 158.00.
- Dominik Kuhn (ed.). Der lateinisch-altenglische Libellus precum in der Handschrift London, British Library, Arundel 155. Münchener Universitätsschriften. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Englischen Philologie 41. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2014, 387 pp., 8 illustr., € 72.95/£ 55.00/$ 88.95.
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- Field, P. J. C. (ed.). Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte Darthur. 2 vols. I: Text, II: Apparatus, Commentary, Glossary and Index of Names. Arthurian Studies 80. Cambridge: Brewer, 2013, xliii + 940 pp./xxxi + 988 pp., £ 150.00.
- Brigitte Johanna Glaser and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz (eds.). Narrating Loss: Representations of Mourning, Nostalgia and Melancholia in Contemporary Anglophone Fictions. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014, 338 pp., € 37.50.
- Vera Nünning (ed.). New Approaches to Narrative: Cognition – Culture – History. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013, 239 pp., 3 figures, 2 tables, € 25.00.
- Birgit M. Bauridl. Betwixt, between, or beyond? Negotiating Transformations from the Liminal Sphere of Contemporary Black Performance Poetry. American Studies – A Monograph Series 215. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013, xi + 326 pp., € 48.00.
- Nadja Gernalzick and Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez (eds.). Transmediality and Transculturality. American Studies – A Monograph Series 233. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013, xxvi + 444 pp., € 52.00.
- Cecile Sandten, Gunter Süß and Melanie Graichen (eds.). Detective Fiction and Popular Visual Culture. CHAT – Chemnitzer Anglistik/Amerikanistik Today 4. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013, 256 pp., € 29.50.
- Books Received
