Behn oroonoko6/10/2023 ![]() Fatefully, his deep fascination with navigation also leads him to board the ship. As we learn from the narrator, every day he is entertained “with globes and maps, and mathematical discourses and instruments.” For Oroonoko, the knowledge imparted by his new European “friend” is a rich source of enlightenment and pleasure. Oroonoko, a West African prince from what is now Ghana, “is introduced to the science and practice of navigation by the commander of an English slave ship,” Sills explains. This critique comes into effect at the very start of the novel, when Behn first refers to navigational instruments. ![]() The novel reflects Behn’s colonial ambivalence and. According to literature professor Adam Sills, Behn sought to challenge readers’ optimistic views of the scientific machinery that propped up the Atlantic slave trade. Behn’s Oroonoko, published in 1688, is about its hero’s love, rebellion, and execution in the erstwhile Dutch and English colony, Surinam. ![]() ![]() A closer look at her fiction, however, suggests that it aspires to much more than a truthful or neutral depiction of reality. In the dedication to her 1688 novel, Oroonoko, Aphra Behn wrote that a “Poet is a Painter in his way he draws to the Life.” Not surprisingly, Behn’s work has been read as an early precursor to literary realism. ![]()
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