SOURCE: "The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 38, No. 4, March, 1984, pp. 384–414.

In the following excerpt, Spengemann argues that Behn's efforts to create a novel popular with the public resulted in a noteworthy and remarkable work.

Reading Oroonoko, as we necessarily do, in the light of all the prose fiction produced over the last three centuries, we tend automatically to think of Behn's work as a novel and then, with Clarissa and Moby-Dick and Ulysses in mind, to dismiss it as a very imperfect example of the genre. Although perhaps unavoidable, this ahistorical view begs its own question: why should we so readily attach the name "novel" to a work written at a time when the various things we understand by that word—the form itself, the world it describes, its peculiar language, the readership to whom it speaks—did not yet exist, were only...