SOURCE: "Aphra Behn in Search of the Novel," in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, Vol. 19, 1989, pp. 277–87.

In the following essay, Zimbardo argues that Behn's skill in using established as well as newly developing styles of discourse is evident in Oroonoko.

In his brilliant book, The Discourse of Modernism, Timothy J. Reiss traces the development in Western discourse from what he calls "the discourse of patterning" to "analytico-referential discourse," the discourse of modernism that was born in the seventeenth century: "a passage from what we might call a discursive exchange within the world to the expressions of knowledge as reasoning practice upon the world."¹ A work of art rendered in the older "discourse of patterning" is what Paul de Man calls a "calligraphy" of emblems "rather than a mimesis."² That is to say, within the older system of discourse a work of art is the organization of a pattern...