Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This essay approaches Behn's late prose text and most famous work, Oroonoko (1688), from the perspective of a modern editor annotating Behn's words.Drawing on my earlier experience of editing Anne Clifford, William Shakespeare, George Herbert and Margaret Cavendish, the article argues that a close examination of a small number of key words can be a means of gaining insights into the nature of a literary work as a whole.This is especially true in the case of Oroonoko, with its alertness to the experience of different languages and the clash of perspectives as cultures encounter one another.I am particularly interested in the ways in which annotation can perform three major tasks: it can elucidate the meanings of individual words in their historical and geographical contexts, highlight their inbuilt ambiguities and associations, and bring out their interpretative function for modern readers.My purpose is to demonstrate not only that putting certain words from the works of Behn and her predecessors under the spotlight is a fascinating process in its own right, but also that understanding the full significance of such words can take us to the very heart of the texts in which they are situated.
Source: Women s Writing
Author: Helen Wilcox
Institution: Bangor University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4409760279