Oroonoko: Post-colonialism, Kant and Todorov

Postcolonial theory looks at history, and it links to culture, sociology, psychology, and even politics and law. This study aims to analyze Aphra Behn Oroonoko with respect to post-colonialism, in particular, investigation of the extent colonialism, slavery, and being other. Oroonoko displays literary fiction and reality at the same time; thus, Immanuel Kant’s concepts of the noumenal world and phenomenal world have significant meaning. It draws on these theories and worlds: while the phenomenal world is day-to-day life conditions, the noumenal world is impossible to experience. On the other hand, Tzvetan Todorov’s perspectives on stories and novels are different, and he puts them in scales such as fantastic, uncanny and marvelous. For Oroonoko, readers can decide the scales only if they are willing to understand Todorov’s aims. The aim of this study is to examine Kant's concepts of the noumenal world and the phenomenal world, and Todorov's scales, as well as colonialism, slavery and being other.

Oroonoko: Post-colonialism, Kant and Todorov

Postcolonial theory looks at history, and it links to culture, sociology, psychology, and even politics and law. This study aims to analyze Aphra Behn Oroonoko with respect to post-colonialism, in particular, investigation of the extent colonialism, slavery, and being other. Oroonoko displays literary fiction and reality at the same time; thus, Immanuel Kant’s concepts of the noumenal world and phenomenal world have significant meaning. It draws on these theories and worlds: while the phenomenal world is day-to-day life conditions, the noumenal world is impossible to experience. On the other hand, Tzvetan Todorov’s perspectives on stories and novels are different, and he puts them in scales such as fantastic, uncanny and marvelous. For Oroonoko, readers can decide the scales only if they are willing to understand Todorov’s aims. The aim of this study is to examine Kant's concepts of the noumenal world and the phenomenal world, and Todorov's scales, as well as colonialism, slavery and being other.

The Letters in the Story

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

“Past Remembrance or History”

Chapter 3 begins with the imaginative vacuum created by the Leveller community’s relative silence after 1653 when John Lilburne was exiled and tracks the Royalist use of literature to reimagine sovereign absolutism beyond the limits of Stuart martyrology as it had emerged in the immediate aftermath of Charles I’s 1649 execution. Writers like William Davenant (1606–1688) and Aphra Behn (1640?–1689) understood this project in clearly hermeneutic terms as they argued that the revitalization of Royalism depended on dissuading members of the commonalty that they were capable of independently producing the kind of knowledge that would ground their claims of political authority and entitle them to political participation.