Truth, Wonder, and Exemplarity in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

Abstract

Overtly locating Oroonoko within the new epistemologies of factual evidence and observational ethnography, Aphra Behn uses belief in new-world wonders to reassert a humanist and royalist model of exemplarity through the character of Oroonoko, not so subtly critiquing her own society's changing values. Behn's deferral (and even deconstruction) of factual truth in Oroonoko to emphasize moral example, in terms of late Renaissance humanism, remains largely ignored. Behn has been examined too frequently in terms of her influence on the novel and not understood sufficiently within her own moment, particularly the pervasive humanist influence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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