Tag Archives: Aphra Behn

Wilmot, Women, and Sexual Pleasure

Apparently the 17th century experienced a small boom in sex toys–which brings John Wilmot’s poetry to mind.

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Who’s Afraid of a Feuding Couple?

Is Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” a feuding couples comedy? Perhaps yes if you add the adjective “dark.”

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Verbal Combat Trumps Soft Romance

Shaw contributed some great plays to the feuding couples comedy genre, including Man and Superman and Pygmalion.

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Feuding Beats Shrew-Taming

“Taming of the Shrew” may have set the stage for the far more egalitarian “Much Ado about Nothing,” which launched the feuding couples comedy.

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Couples Fighting: It Must Be Love

Tuesday I read plays all day yesterday with an eye toward an upcoming class on “Battling Couples in Theatre and Film (the Comic Version).” The September course is part of Sewanee’s “Lifelong Learning” series. As the course runs for four weeks, I will teach four plays and four movies, pairing a play with a film […]

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Caution against Purity Policing

Monday One of my conservative readers wrote me recently asking me how I felt about leftist insistence that Virginia governor Ralph Northam resign for having posted a racist picture in his medical school yearbook years ago. After all, hasn’t Northam lived a fairly exemplary life since then? The reader also sent me a Quillette article […]

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Women Battling the Marriage Plot

Although men got the quest plot while women were relegated to the marriage plot in the 18th century, a number of women writers found imaginative ways to circumvent it. Among these were Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

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Lit for Handling a College’s Race Problems

After a series of arson fires and racist incidents, I turned to works in each of my courses to address the situation. In Intro to Lit, Lucille Clifton’s poetry; in Early British Literature survey, Aphra Behn’s “Oroonoko”; in British Fantasy, “Perdido Street Station.”

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10 Memorable Poetic Pick-Up Lines

10 memorable pick-up lines from poetic greats. Try them at a bar near you.

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