“Faith: Impersonating Faith, or How We Came to Have Faith in Fictions” analyzes how faith was taken up by Reformation theologians, by political theorist Thomas Hobbes, and by Aphra Behn in her earliest prose fiction. The chapter takes up “faith” at a key point in its history, in order to account for what it meant before secularization and for what its role would be in a secular epistemology, politics, and culture. It analyzes Thomas Hobbes and Aphra Behn in order to see how they link the idea of faith to the emergent category of fiction: In Hobbes, the political project of contract relies on fictionality for its form, while in Behn, the fictional project of the nascent novel relies on faith for its form.

From John Dryden’s essays onward, satire has persisted in English critical discussions as the domain of male writers. Dryden’s contemporary, Aphra Behn, has, accordingly, been excluded from consideration as a major satirist despite critics’ ongoing recognition of satiric elements in her works, especially her plays, and the reclamation of a couple of her obviously satiric poems. This essay examines masculine critical traditions set by Dryden and his successors along with their considerations of Juvenalian, Horatian, and Menippean satire in order to expose the forces shaping conceptions of satire as an inherently masculine genre. It simultaneously foregrounds the role satire plays in shaping eighteenth-century genres as it frames Behn as a major satiric writer. Ultimately, this essay places Behn alongside her male contemporaries, as satirist and – through satire’s deconstructive forces – as facilitator of new generic modes, notably literary criticism, miscellany poems, the novel, and comedy of manners. Just as she was second only in productivity to John Dryden, Behn rivaled him in witty social commentary on literary traditions and in challenges to those traditions by producing varied works that were satiric in their fabric.

The Coda briefly explores how depictions of female adolescent brainwork grew more negative over the course of the seventeenth century, particularly in some medical and sexual handbooks. This loss of girls’ minds to their raging adolescent physiognomies suggests some kind of shift in popular thinking about female adolescent cognition — or, at least, in how to market it. At the same time, other writers (including some medical ones) continued to feature girls’ focused and dynamic brainwork. The Coda concludes by considering the 1687 journal entry of a Protestant Englishman who recorded his visit to an English Carmelite convent in Antwerp, where he encountered a young novice who challenged his concerns that she was being buried alive and claimed she would not wish to change places with any woman. His description of the conversation that “materially passed between us,” and of her pledge to remember and pray for him, suggests that notions of embodied and extended cognition were still in circulation, even as theories like Cartesian dualism and the mechanistic body were developing in the latter half of the century. And that English girls’ dynamic brainwork continued to be recognized and valued — if, perhaps, in more limited contexts.

Eighteenth-century British culture witnessed the ascendance of the ideology of proper human form, a belief system interlinking concepts of the beautiful, the natural, and the good with proper bodily configuration. The relatively new discourses of physics, biology, and aesthetics, and the re-emergence of the ancient pseudo-science of physiognomy, contributed to the formation of this ideology. Many of the period’s literary texts endorsed and/or critiqued social expectations of the beautiful and the natural, as these established the popular assumption that a well-shaped and good-looking body instantiated the proper human form. This assumption in turn associated proper form with high moral standards, the possession of which determined an individual’s social respectability and acceptance. Such physiognomic thinking also equated deformity with depravity. However, authors such as Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Sarah Scott, each in their own way, exposed the complexities and contradictions inherent in such reasoning. Moreover, the novel – emerging as a genre during this century – assumed an important role by becoming a vehicle by which the culture of sensibility softened and appropriated certain aspects of the ideology of form by recasting defective and deformed characters as objects of pity and charity.

John Staines explores the role of compassion in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688). He argues that although the novel’s attitude towards slavery is complicated, its pathos makes readers feel compassion for an injustice committed against a noble human. Behn’s narrative stands at the start of the creation of the modern novel, a new genre that justified itself as a means of educating readers in sentiment and sympathy. Yet Behn’s decision to end her story by torturing and dismembering her hero is, by the standards of later novels, shockingly indecorous as it forces readers to confront his body in a final scene of compassion. In this chapter, John Staines demonstrates that the appeal to compassion is central to Behn’s text, as it is central to neoclassical discussions of rhetoric and poetics. Oroonoko’s pathos helped it continue to have influence long after its political interventions had passed into obscurity and irrelevance. Its shared suffering endured.