Jorge Figueroa Dorrego

University of Vigo | UVIGO · Department of English, French and German Philology

This article describes the challenges the Restoration Comedy Project team have had to face regarding the creation and applicability of genre labels in their online database and printed catalogues of the comedies produced between 1660 and 1682. Those challenges have had largely to do with the intrinsic difficulty of classifying literary works by gen...

In spite of her criticism against farce in the paratexts of The Emperor of the Moon (1687), Aphra Behn makes an extensive use of farcical elements not only in that play and The False Count (1681), which are actually described as farces in their title pages, but also in Sir Patient Fancy (1678), The Feign’d Curtizans (1679), and The Second Part of T...

This article draws on recent studies on the fear of derisive laughter (or 'gelotophobia') in order to relate them to early modern comments on laughter and to the representation of that anxiety in some texts of Restoration prose fiction, and with a particular emphasis on Alexander Oldys's The Fair Extravagant (1682). Gelotophobia is a variant of sha...

Although the prostitute became a fairly common figure in eighteenth-century prose fiction, there were already narrative texts dealing with that type of character in Restoration England, although most of them have been largely disregarded. This article will focus on three of those texts: 1) The Crafty Whore (1658), an anonymous dialogue between two...

Miguel de Cervantes’s narrative “El curioso impertinente” [“The Curious Impertinent”] inserted into the first part of Don Quixote, fascinated the English playwrights of the seventeenth century. This tragic story about curiosity, fidelity, voyeurism and male homosociality was adapted in plots or subplots of several plays written in the Jacobean and...

men enjoy all the powers nature has endowed on them as men and they fear that women will take some of their power away. There can be no doubt that if women didn't devote themselves to their appearance, making themselves more feminine than nature intended, and if, instead of studying how to arrange their hair and make up their faces, they applied th...

In the preface to She Ventures and He Wins (1695), the young woman signing as "Ariadne" says that the plot of this play is taken from "a small novel," the title of which she does not mention. Neither the editors Lyons and Morgan (1991) nor any of the few critics that have recently commented on this piece have identified the text upon which the play...

In Alexander Oldys's The Fair Extravagant (1682), the male protagonist is anxious about his authority as a husband due to the heroine's superior social rank and wealth, her strong personality, and her free agency. This paper shows how this is presented in a kind of novel of trial that intends to test the protagonist's manly virtues through a comic...

umour is empowering. This is so because humour can uphold dominance or, contrariwise, it can be rebellious and transgressive, and in both cases it is aggressive and a sign of self-assertion. At the same time, humour is a pleasurable form of releasing repressed feelings, of liberating social and psychic pressure. Moreover, humour offers the intellec...

In Aphra Behn's witty short story entitled 'Memoirs of the Court of the King of Bantam', the haughty and extravagant Mr Wou'd be King is mercilessly ridiculed by the narrator and the main characters. He is deliberately invited to Sir Philip Friendly's social gatherings to be fleeced and laughed at, as he is rich and believes he will one day be-come...

In Thomas Deloney's novels there is as much idealisation and wishful thinking as in Elizabethan romances. Jack of Newbury appeals to the fantasies of middle-class readers, and it conveys a bourgeois ethical code. To that extent, it can be considered a "trading-class romance." Yet, what makes Jack of Newbury different from romance is not only the so...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the representation of women in English jest-books of the early seventeenth century. This period of time is particularly interesting because of the large amount of jest-books that were brought out then, because the formal controversy about women was at its height, and because it was the age when more and more Engl...

In spite of the general idea that the pastoral mode is superficial and escapist in the negative sense, it is actually a type of writing which authors from antiquity to the present day have used for social, political and moral purposes. Due to its classical origin, the mode was highly regarded during the Renaissance, when it was cultivated by most o...

This is a bibliography of prose fiction written by English women in the seventeenth century. It includes sections on general bibliographies, studies and anthologies, and on the various writers involved (Mary Wroth, Anna Weamys, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix, and Delarivier Manley), each divided into primary and seconda...

Universidade de Vigo Mary Wroth and María de Zayas, the first women writers of prose fiction in Britain and Spain respectively, both wrote in the first half of the seventeenth century, but they chose to do it in two different narrative genres. Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (1621) was a long roman à clef with reminiscences of Sidney's...