ABSTRACT
Gallagher claims in her introduction that nobody's story is not about women as nobodies but about literal nobodies: authorial personae, printed books, scandalous allegories, intellectual property rights, literary reputations, incomes, debts, and fictional characters. On comparing Roxana to Defoe's earlier works, like Robinson Crusoe, people see less of the assured religious writer and more of a disturbed novelist trying to come to terms with the consequences of an increasingly skeptical and immoral world embodied by that most dangerous figure of all, the Amazonian Libertine. This chapter provides a visual spectacle that James Turner describes in Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 as part of popular libertinism and it responds to the violent libertine culture that Behn also examines both in her plays and fiction. Far from acting as a Georgian libertine capable of reform, Roxana is an Amazonian Libertine, a Hobbesian predator of inveterate, unrepentant vice.
