“Going Surprising” with Aphra Behn

This essay looks at two slightly off-kilter grammatical constructions in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) as occasions to explore surprise as both affective response and aesthetic judgment. In Oroonoko, surprises are never too surprising: they are sought out and lingered over; they are voluntary activities rather than involuntary responses. This sort of aesthetic surprise is intimately bound up with the work of literary genre. If genre is an “aesthetic structure of affective expectation … that absorbs all kinds of small variations or modifications while promising that the persons transacting with it will experience the pleasure of encountering what they expected” (Lauren Berlant), it must have some relation to the expected-unexpected, to the not-too-surprising surprise: the modification or variation that is easily absorbed.