Professor of English Mark Blackwell (Department of English and Modern Languages, College of Arts and Sciences) recently published an article on early fiction, “The Inside Story: Body Language and Free Indirect Discourse in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” The article appears in the latest number of Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Volume 58, Issue 2). The work is the product of Blackwell’s sabbatical in AY 2024–25, devoted in part to research on the development of techniques for representing characters’ interiority in early English novels.
In his discussion of Behn’s seventeenth-century account of an African prince’s enslavement and execution, Blackwell identifies a previously unremarked, early example of free indirect discourse—a narrative strategy for disclosing the contents of a character’s mind—and situates that instance of fictional experimentation in the context of Oroonoko’s broader interest in the problem of understanding other minds and unfamiliar cultures. Though free indirect discourse is typically construed as an effective method for depicting otherwise invisible interior states, Behn uses it to draw readers’ attention to the dubious reliability of both linguistic and nonlinguistic media of communication and to the limits of our capacity to know what another mind thinks, what another body feels.