『오루노코』와 아프라 벤의 작가성 = Aphra Behn`s Authorship in and out of Oroonoko

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Authorship is one of the significant issues in the eighteenth-century studies partly because an author`s self-representation has been hugely altered in that period with the establishment of professional (imaginative) writership along with the cultural shifts from patronage system to literary market or from scribal culture to print culture. In this paper, I examine how the authorship of Aphra Behn, the supposedly first female professional writer in Britain, features in a varied way according to the generic distinctions of play and the new genre of the novel, particularly paying attention to her authorship as a novelist through a reading of Oroonoko. Behn`s authorship as a playwright roughly corresponds to Johnsonian authorship, who argues that writing for bread is an honorable job, as opposed to the Popean myth of author as a hero against literary marketplace. When it comes to the novel, which deals with the contradictory reality of contemporaneity in a “realist” way, however, Behn reveals a distinctive kind of authorship from that of a playwright in heroic drama or Restoration comedy with rigid decorum. She attempts to figure out the place of the novelist as both a passive participant and an active historian/artist, as we see in Oroonoko, who might be helpless in an active intervention in the contemporary reality yet still able to enact empowerment as a writer through her female pen.