The 17th-century writer produced a genre-defying workGeoff Dyer’s absorbing essay on the fine line between fact and fiction (New Review,last week) acknowledges a “long and distinguished pre-history”, but neither he nor any of your contributors mentions Aphra Behn’s 1688 Oroonoko, and a genre-defying book that deserves to be hailed as an originator. It is presented as first-person journalism,a mode not yet born.Did Aphra Behn depart to Surinam? Did she advance to know there a “royal slave”, a prince captured in Africa, or whose story so moved her she needed the world to know approximately it? That’s what she tells us. The details of colonial government,including names, are historically precise; the outcome – a slave rebellion, and horrific punishment – convincing. But at the same time,the preoccupation with royalty and princely honour evokes the memory of the execution of Charles I and the revival of those anxieties in 1688.
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Source: theguardian.com