Oroonoko | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 24 pages of analysis & critique of Oroonoko.
This section contains 7,003 words
(approx. 24 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Catherine Gallagher

SOURCE: "The Author-Monarch and the Royal Slave: Oroonoko and the Blackness of Representation," in Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820, University of California Press, 1994, pp. 49–87.

In the excerpt below, Gallagher discusses the meaning of blackness in relation to European society in Oroonoko.

Behn's narrators, to be sure, are not the faceless, third-person, omniscient storytellers invented by later generations of writers. In accordance with the conventions of the seventeenth century, almost all of them intermittently use the first person, especially to explain how they came by their knowledge of the story. In the very process of explaining themselves, however, the narrators often become mysterious. The following passage from Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister is typical of these first-person statements: "I have heard her page say, from whom I have had a great part of the truths of her life, that he never...

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This section contains 7,003 words
(approx. 24 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Catherine Gallagher
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Critical Essay by Catherine Gallagher from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.