Andrade, Susan Z. "White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko." Cultural Critique 27 (Spring 1994): 189-214. [While Behn has rightly been celebrated as an important novelist, such celebration has blinded feminist critics to the role of Imoinda and its importance to a reading of the novel. "My point is that here the construction of sexuality, as well as of race and gender, is imbricated in and ultimately supports, however ambivalently, the colonial order in which the text was written" (208).]

Ballaster, Ros. "The New Hystericism: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: The Body, the Text, and the Feminist Critic." In New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 283-95. ["This article sets about the assessment of the recent history of feminist criticism and of historical criticism, employing Aphra Behn's early colonial narrative Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688), as just such a stage of conflict for literary critical reading" (283). Argues that new historicism is insensitive to the historical roles of women and the woman writer. Oroonoko "sets into motion a certain drama of conflict and repression between the white feminist reader, author, or critic and the black female subject" (284).]

Brown, Laura. "The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slave." In The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum. New York: Methuen, 1987. 41-61. [Sets its reading of Oroonoko in the context of post-colonial and feminist theory on the connections of race and gender, a relationship embodied in the narrator and hero of Behn's novel. Behn normalizes Oroonoko by presenting him, in effect, as a blackened European within a romantic tradition. But that tradition does not account for Behn's treatment of the Indians and of the slave uprising. Women (the narrator) play an intermediate role between heroic romance and mercantile imperialism. Behn's critique of slavery lies in her negative portrait of the English colonizers.]

Erickson, Robert A. "Mrs. A. Behn and the Myth of Oroonoko-Imoinda." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5.3 (April 1993): 201-16. [Focuses on the relationship of the older Mrs. Behn, writing near her death in 1688, to the young Aphra who witnessed the events of the novel; sees the two figures as the sources of the myth of stoic suffering enacted by Oronooko and Imoinda. This myth reflects both political threats of 1688 and archetypes of the past (Oroonoko and Imoinda as Adam and Eve; Oroonoko as the suffering Christ).

Ferguson, Moira. "Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko." Women's Studies 19.2 (1991): 159-81. [Such terms as race, class, and gender need to be defined in relation to the particular historical conditions in which they function; they are "historically contingent and relational rather than foundational concepts." The treatment of the terms in Oroonoko, especially the relation of its hero to its narrator and the overlapping identities of Behn and Imoinda, illustrates their uncertainties and conflicts.]

--. "Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm." New Literary History 23.2 (Spring 1992): 339-59.  [Oroonoko's multiple levels of meaning. It "reflects Behn's political views, conflict between her younger and older selves, a romantic eulogy, a Eurocentric attitude toward slavery and a feminist response to misogyny."]

Frohock, Richard., "Violence and Awe: The Foundations of Government in Aphra Behn's New World Settings." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8.4 (July 1996): 437-52. [Behn supports the expansion of colonies (and regrets the loss of Surinam to the Dutch), even though she recounts in moving and specific details the brutalities of colonialism and slavery. But she sees such brutalities as the actions of the "low" and possibly illegitimate classes of colonial society rather than of the plantation owners.]

Gautier, Gary. "Slavery and the Fashioning of Race in Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe and Equjano's Life." The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 42.2 (Summer 2001): 161-80. [Argues that in Oroonoko Behn retains her conservative position by attacking commercial slavery rather than all slavery. "Robinson Crusoe is poised between these two poles-slavery justified by a landed class paradigm, as in Behn's Oroonoko, and slavery justified by a race paradigm," Sees Behn, Defoe, and Equiano as "vectors" of the developing conceptualization of race in the eighteenth century.]

Holmesland, Oddvar. "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Cultural Dialectics and the Novel." ELH 68.1 (Spring 2001): 57-79. ["Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave can be seen as a transition from the late 17^th-century aristocratic romance to a more rational progressive age. The central character, a black prince, acts as a progressive individual whose ethical behavior embodies ideological instability" (abstract).]

Lipking, Joanna, ed. Aphra Behn: Oroonoko. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. [Provides the text of Oroonoko (in original spelling and capitalization), with background material on slavery, responses to Behn from 1682 to 1948, and six recent critical essays (abridged), including those of Spencer, Brown, and Sussman.]

O'Donnell, Mary Ann. Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. New York and London: Garland, 1986. [An annotated bibliography that lists and describes the primary material (primarily editions of Behn's work) and covers secondary material to about 1985. The bibliography is updated on her recent web site: <www.c18.rutgers.edu/biblio.behn.html>.

Pacheco, Anita. "Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko." Studies in English Literature 34.3 (Summer 1994): 491-506. ["The text's ideology is distinctly royalist, but . . . its effort at ideological closure is undermined both by its reliance on the unstable discourse of honor and by its own continuity with a historical period whose shifting social and power relations disrupt its ostensible unity." A complex reading of the novel's ideology sees Oroonoko as both rebel and martyr.]

Pigg, Daniel. "Trying to Frame the Unframable: Oroonoko as Discourse in Aphra Behn's Oroonooko." Studies in Short Fiction 34.1 (Winter 1997): 105-11. [In communicating by gesture as well as by words, Oroonoko "represents a different order of discursive model, unlike the typical European discourse."]

Rivera, Albert J. "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and the 'Blank Spaces' of Colonial Fiction." Studies in English Literature 39.3 (Summer 1999): 443-62. [Briefly compares Oroonoko to Heart of Darkness and reviews the issue of its historicity, but primarily provides a reading of it, in post-colonial terms, as a tale of mourning.]

Rogers, Katharine M. "Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko." Studies in the Novel 20.1 (Spring 1988): 1-15. [Most of the Surinam details of Oroonoko are accurate; they suggest that Behn had in fact been there. But the African details are accurate as well, or at least represent common European misunderstandings of African practices. Behn did not make up either half of the novel out of whole cloth. Her use of conventions from the heroic play makes the novel less realistic but heightens its symbolic power. Although not an abolitionist, Behn was seriously concerned about slavery, and her tale shows the hypocrisy of Christians.]

Schille, Candy B. K. "Harems and Master Narratives: Imoinda's Story in Oroonoko." Journal of African Travel Writing. 5 (1998): 15-24. [Does Imoinda have a voice in Behn's novel? Can she serve as a source for her own story? Can she even speak English? The answers are unclear. The image of her in the romanticized harem sequence implies her role in a "homosocial power exchange" of which Oroonoko is part and in which Behn is complicit. If Imoinda's story reflects Oroonoko's fears, it does Behn's fears as well. "So overlaid with hearsay and competing psycho-social agendas is Imoinda's story that it can hardly be said to be hers at all" (22).

Sussman, Charlotte. "The Other Problem with Women: Reproduction and Slave Culture in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko." In Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993. 212-33. [Slavery was particularly brutal in repressing kinship (and hence the conception of a son motivates Oroonoko's rebellion). Women served both as workers themselves and as producers of further workers. Imoinda is "figured simultaneously as a passive piece of property and as an erotic, powerful agent" (215). Imoinda's murder takes the place of a successful rebellion against the slaver owners. "The political issue of slavery is almost entirely deflected onto the more conventional, more tasteful, and more easily resolved problem of heroic romance" (228). The issue of slavery is never raised by the narrator herself.

Todd, Janet, ed. Aphra Behn: Contemporary Critical Essays. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. [Reprints previously published essays, including important ones on Oroonoko: Laura Brown, "The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves" (180-208); and Margaret Ferguson, "Juggling and the Trade in Slaves" (180-208).]

--. Aphra Behn Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. [Includes new essays on Oroonoko by Catherine Gallagher and Joanna Lipking. Catherine Gallagher, "Oroonoko's Blackness" (235-58) argues that the hero's blackness has "three layers of significance: it celebrates a certain textual effect produced by print, which Oroonoko allies with heroic authorship; it emblematizes the hero's kingship; and it is a metonymic sign of his commodification" (235); Joanna Lipking, "Confusing Matters: Searching for Backgrounds for Oroonoko" (259-81) argues that Behn's sources, in romances and historical writings, on both Africa and Surinam, suggest the fictional nature of the Africa story and the historicity of the treatment of slavery.

--. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. [What is known with certainty about Behn can be stated on a single page, Todd admits at the outset. She takes over 500-by mining Behn's writings for biographical implications, by putting Behn in her political, social, and literary contexts, and by pure speculation. Of the other biographies, George Woodcock, The Incomparable Aphra (London: Boardman, 1948), though early and colored by Woodcock's anarchist politics, is still useful; Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640-89 (London: Cape, 1977) is strong on historical detail but weak on literary analysis; much the same can be said for Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial, 1980), which is particularly strong on women in seventeenth-century society and on Behn's difficult role as a writer.]

Williams, Andrew P. "The African as Text: Ownership and Authority in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko." Journal of African Travel 5 (1998): 2-14. ["In this essay I wish to demonstrate how Behn-through a series of textual strategies that eroticize and commodify the bodies of the two African protagonists, while, simultaneously, calling into question the validity and authority off their voices-establishes her control over Oroonoko's story" (5). In effect, Behn becomes the owner of Oroonoko. (But what are the ontological implications of invalidating the authority of a fictional character? The theoretical issue of colonial or authorial hegemony collides with the theoretical and historical issue of the factuality of Oroonoko.)]

Wiseman, S. J. Aphra Behn. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996. [An introduction designed for the general reader (i.e., undergraduates). Its treatment of Oroonoko emphasizes the novel's conflicting romantic and economic discourses, especially in its treatment of Surinam. The result is a doubleness or ambivalence in the position of the narrator, the treatment of the central characters, and the responses of the reader.]

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