The re-readings of Behn’s works here proposed signal new perspectives in the relationships between the 'text' and its reception. The different points of view on the work of an author who was ahead of her time with her life and her writing, confirm once more how the 'incomparable Astrea' is still our contemporary.

• Maureen Duffy focuses on Behn’s friendship with Otway, the unhappy playwright whom she helped financially and who shares with her the role of pioneer of a 'three hundred year tradition in English literature of professional writers for the growing market.'
• Rosamaria Loretelli re-reads Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, one of the first novels to express the emerging interest for 'true history', in relation to time strategy.
• Other aspects of the same novel are examined by Annamaria Lamarra, who deals in particular with the new vision of the individual in its relationships with the world.
• The ethnologist aspect of Oroonoko is the theme chosen by Margarete Rubik and Danièle Frison. Behn’s unprejudiced curiosity towards otherness is the theme chosen. Through the eyes of her Indian or Black observers she criticises aspects of European values and ways of life.
• Oroonoko seen as the first conjunction of Europe, Africa and America in the English novel is Bernard Dhuicq’s point.
• Restoration cosmopolitanism, largely due to the new attitude towards geographic discoveries, is the topic focused on by Jessica Munns, who examines Behn’s attitude towards aspects seemingly quite different from her own culture.
• Oroonoko and its author are present in Jane Stevenson’s trilogy Astrea, The Pretender, The Empress of the Last Days (2001-2003), focussed on by Jacqueline Pearson.
• Viola Papetti investigates the theme of the perjured nun, a successful topic in seventeenth century France in particular, starting from one of the first European bestsellers, the Lettres portugaises, and finding links between Behn’s nuns and Manzoni’s Geltrude.
• Behn’s plays are the issue chosen by Annamaria Palombi, who concentrates on elements of meta-theatre in Behn’s plays.
• Behn’s links with modernism in relation to poetry is the point focused on by Oddvar Holmesland, who reads Behn’s poem A Voyage to the Isle of Love in the light of modernist theories.
• The separation between philosophical and theological matters, an essential chapter in the history of modern thought, is the issue dealt with by Violetta Trofimova.
• The problems to be faced when translating from one cultural context into another is Alba Graziano’s point with reference to her own translation into Italian of Behn’s comedy Sir Patient Fancy.
• Roberta Falcone demonstrates how Behn’s translations, as well as her theoretical position on the subject, summarise aspects of the current debate on the gender of the translator and its 'difference'.