Awards

• Winner of Named as Outstanding Academic Book of 2001 by Choice.

Overview

Aphra Behn, now becoming recognized as a major Restoration figure, is especially significant as an early example of a successful professional woman writer: an important and often troubling role-model for later generations of women. This book shows that her influence on eighteenth-century literature was far-reaching. Because literary history was (and to an extent still is) based on notions of patrilineal succession, it has been difficult to recognize the generative work of women's texts among male writers. This book suggests that Behn had 'sons' as well as 'daughters' and argues that we need a feminist revision of the notion of literary influence. Behn's reputation was very different in different genres. The book analyses her reception as a poet, a novelist, and a dramatist, showing how reactions to her became an important part of the creation of the English literary canon.

Full Product Details

9780198184942

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Reviews

Jane Spencer's erudite and entertaining book offers an important argument about gender and influence and brings an exceptional grasp of historical nuance to Behn's works themselves and the various ways in which they were coopted by later writers in the service of a range of different agendas ... Jane Spencer's book will be a model for all later studies of gender and literary influence. The Seventeenth Century Spencer's book is original in its argument, wide-ranging in its frame of reference, and written in elegant and lucid prose. It makes an important contribution to Aphra Behn studies and the history of women's writing more generally. It will have a lasting impact, too, on the study of cultural transmission and canon formation in the eighteenth century and beyond. Review of English Studies

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