2025/09/03 by Andrew McRae · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories
paper · doi:10.1080/0268117x.2025.2551211
openalex publication_date 2025/09/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This article considers the group of extended political poems written by Aphra Behn in the final years of her life, 1685-89. These poems, concerned with the succession of James II, the birth of a male heir, and the assumption of authority by William of Orange, were the most explicit political works that Behn produced. Each of these poems either aligns with or reflects upon the genre of panegyric, one of the major poetic genres of seventeenth-century England. The article argues that Behn was interested not merely with the authority of her nation’s rulers, but at least as much with the work of poets. Behn wrote as though she had a political choice. Her appreciation of panegyric as a medium that may be tuned to a politics of division as much as unity, exposes with unprecedented clarity a tension that had been inherent within this genre throughout the Stuart era.