Since the publication of Mary Rowlandson's, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God . . ., released six years after the close of King Philip's War and the death of the Pokanoket leader, Metacomet, in 1682, the Indian captivity narrative has operated as a widely influential component of American literary, historical, and cultural discourse. From the seventeenth century to the present, the metaphors, symbols, and the implicit ideologies of this literary genre have had a powerful and enduring influence on the public's perception of American Indian people, and the development of an expansionist American ideology. As a result, the operant binary of the bloodthirsty "savage" and the "civilized" Euro-American has become a common feature of discourses in which American Indian people have been, and continue to be, represented in American historiography, literature, art, film, and popular culture, while also serving as a primary textual justification for the territorial expansion of the United States, and as an implicit justification and historical alibi for the concomitant destruction of American Indian societies and cultures.In this work, my aim is to deconstruct and demystify the regime of literary and historical privilege that has become an explicit function of Rowlandson's text and subsequent narratives by presenting a critical perspective that is responsive to the complex array of social, cultural, and historical forces that were converging in the Massachusetts colony during the late seventeenth century. In so doing, I have attempted to present the "Indian side" of the story and examine the events that Rowlandson describes in her narrative from the perspective of Indian people who have been all too often silenced in American historical and literary discourses. I have addressed and attempted to answer some of the nagging questions surrounding the original publication and dissemination of Rowlandson's work in order to shed some much needed light on the complex cultural and social processes at work in Puritan society during the seventeenth century, while illustrating how texts such as Rowlandson's continues to shape our perceptions of others and our own conceptions of historical reality.

This project considers questions of religious othering in the contemporary United States through the lens of popular post-religious narratives. These narratives salaciously depict mistreated women in order to demarcate certain religions as deviant; authors and pundits then use these narratives in order to justify outside intervention in specific religious communities. By closely analyzing a selection of contemporary narratives written about women from Muslim and fundamentalist Mormon communities with special attention to both the feminist enactments and tropes of captivity which permeate these texts, this project challenges simplistic portrayals of religious Others. In doing so, the analysis draws the reader's attention to the uncanny imitations in many of these texts: in arguing that certain religions "capture" their female adherents, authors of contemporary captivity narratives silence the voices of women whose stories they seek to illuminate. The dissertation also explores the ambivalent content of many of these narratives. When read against the grain, captivity literature offers surprising opportunities for nuanced explorations of religion, gender and agency. / Religion

Combining the critical lenses of early American scholarship and that of the modern South, “Captive Women, Cunning Texts” investigates the uses and transformations of tropes of captivity drawn from the American Indian captivity narrative by women writers of the Southern Renaissance (circa 1910-45). Specifically, this study examines how captivity narratives, the first American literary form dominated by white women’s experiences as writers and readers, provided the female authors of the Southern Renaissance with a genre ideal for critiquing the roles of women in the South, and the official constructions of southern history. This work interrogates the multifaceted ways in which the captivity genre enabled these female authors to reject typical male modes of expression and interpretation, as well as male images portraying women in mythical terms that conflicted with the real experiences and boundaries of their lives. Through critical case studies of Evelyn Scott, Beatrice Witte Ravenel, and Caroline Gordon, this study demonstrates that many women writers of this period self-consciously returned to the literary past of American captivity narratives for models and, in so doing, discovered modes of discourse and tropes of confinement that aided them in their struggle to redefine their place and that of the racial and cultural Other in southern society, literature, and history. Their strategic re-employment of the captivity tradition literally and metaphorically provided liminal sites of exchange that both reveal and inspire agency and change in their unmasking of tradition, veneer, and the deeply imbedded cultural exchange of the white female body.

In the aftermath of King Philip's War, Puritan Mary Rowlandson recorded her experiences as an Indian captive. In a vivid story that recollects the details of these events, Rowlandson attempts to impart a message to her community through the use of a variety of literary techniques. The genre of the Indian captivity narrative is a literary construct that she develops out of the following literary forms that existed at the time of her writing. These are the spiritual autobiography, a documentary method meant to archive spiritual and emotional growth through a record of daily activities; the conversion narrative, which made public one's theological assurance of God's grace; and the jeremiad, a sermon form designed to remind Puritans of their Covenant with God. To her contemporaries, Rowlandson served as an example of God's Providence. To later generations and specifically twenty-first century scholars, she represents America's first female literary prose voice.

in English This particular MA thesis concentrates on the portrayal of Indians in captivity narratives of the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the essential source material being Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, first published in 1682. The thesis explores the relationship between Native Americans and settlers who saw Indians as a threat to their own existence and also as a threat to the western expansion. It also focuses on the confrontation of savagery and civilization from the point of view of common presuppositions and prejudices about the Native Americans that are very often depicted in several captivity narratives. Moreover, the thesis provides necessary definition of the genre of the captivity narrative with regard to the reaction of the reading public in the period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the first arrivals of settlers and explorers the American continent symbolized a land of vast opportunities. Nevertheless, the continent not being fully explored was shrouded in a veil of mystery. Explorers and adventurers were fascinated by the extensive natural resources they found in the New World. Moreover, the New World was often called New Canaan or the Garden of Eden as it symbolized for the newcomers a possibility to start a new...

Captives. The works of Johannes Schiltberger, George of Hungary and Konstantin Mihailović as testimonies about late medieval search for identity and cultural integration in the Muslim world Bc. Karolina Srncová The master's thesis enquires into the phenomenon of late medieval reflection on Muslim society in captivity narratives, treatises and memoirs from the pen of former Christian captives. Through a comparison of testimonies by three Europeans, who spent long years in Ottoman or Tatar captivity, the thesis investigates the process of their integration in the Muslim world, their perception of this world, and the notion of it they kept after their return to Christian Europe. Apart from the literary reflection on the other the thesis also pursues authors themselves - how they perceived and constructed their cultural identity in the strange environment, what long-term modus vivendi they employed and by what narratives they tried to present their infidel past back in their homeland. Thus the work aims to contribute to our notion of the Christian-Ottoman encounters in the 15th century, but also to consider the cultural adaptability of late medieval man and the role of captives, men between two worlds, who had to cope with the demands of such an adaptation.

The following essay examines the image of "Barbary piracy" created by two prominent political figures, Thomas Jefferson and William Eaton, and by the American public from 1784 to 1805, and how those images shaped the policy of the American-Barbary War. Eaton‟s Orientalist approach to describing piracy and the North African population limited his views of this region, thus reducing the American conflict to the annihilation of animalistic "brutes." Jefferson‟s practical approach to describing piracy and the North African population focused on emancipating the region from the corrupting influence of greed, allowing him the necessary flexibility to solve the conflict by either by military force or with peace treaties, whichever was necessary. I will show the impact that categorizing piracy as either the result of a depraved society or as a corrupting force had on both American perceptions of the North Africa people and on the outcome of the American-Barbary War.

Cette thèse examine le discours puritain ainsi que les différentes manifestations de la présence indienne et de la voix indienne (Indian agency) dans la littérature Puritaine des XVIIème et XVIIIème siècles en général et dans les récits de captivité indienne en particulier. Les récits de captivité manquent évidemment d’objectivité en ceci qu’ils présentent une version unique des faits (celle des auteurs puritains des récits). Le problème de la subjectivité se pose d’autant plus lorsque l’on examine les paroles censées avoir été prononcées par les Indiens (les paroles que leur attribuent leurs anciens captifs). Ce constat nous a amené à poser la question suivante : par-delà la définition du récit de captivité au sens concret du terme (otages puritains entre les mains des Indiens dans le contexte précis de l’Amérique du Nord coloniale), n’y aurait-il pas lieu de postuler l’existence, au sein de ces récits (« en filigrane ») d’autres formes, plus abstraites, de captivité, comme celle que constituerait l’« l’emprisonnement » de la « voix » indienne dans des récits écrits par des blancs ? Cette voix indienne, comment se manifeste-t-elle dans les récits du corpus? Quels discours les auteurs attribuent-ils à leurs anciens ravisseurs ? / This study is dedicated to the analysis of seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century Puritan discourse and the way in which the agency of Indian appears in writings penned by the Puritans, a prominent subsection of which falls under the genre known as Indian Captivity Narrative. My main intention was to go beyond the initial characterization of captivity narratives and claim that these texts are not only about the actual physical and moral experience of the white Christian captives among the Indians, but also deal with more abstract and less often addressed forms of captivity. One such (less immediately obvious) form of captivity is, metaphorically speaking, that of the Indian “voice” in white narratives. This study therefore addresses the following questions: How does the Indian voice come across in such prose? What kinds of discourse do Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Swarton, and other former captives attribute to their former abductors? How do these former captives render and reconstruct dialogues that purportedly occurred between them and their Indian captors? This presentation of the Indian voice is not only conditioned by the former captive’s attitude (i.e., by the author’s voice), but it is also altered by the specific bias of those in charge of controlling the contents of the narrative, i.e., the editors and the publishers, such as Cotton and Increase Mather, who were the most influential representatives of the political and religious establishment of the time.

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