This study examined the literary treatment of the Indian in the works of five representative writers who, between 1820 and 1860, used the materials of King Philip's War as their narrative focus. The works are James Eastburn and Robert Sands' Yamoyden (1820), a verse romance, John Augustus Stone's Metamora (1829), a stare melodrama, James Fenimore Cooper's The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish,(1828) G. B. Hollister's Mount Hope (1851), and D. P. Thompson's The Doomed Chief (1860), all prose romances.The above works reflect the principal trends and influences operative upon American writers who utilized Indian subjects during the Romantic era. King Philip's War appealed to these writers primarily because its remoteness in time cast, in William Tudor's words, "a shade of obscurity resembling that of antiquity,"l and its events and characters were colorful enough to be of romantic interest. Primitivistic tradition had conceived the Indian as Noble Savage, presumably a creature better able to live virtuously than civilized man.1William Tudor, Jr., "An Address Delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society," The North American Review, II (November,1815), 14.Most writers felt the need, nevertheless, to accommodate this myth to historical realities. Unlike the Noble Savage of tradition, experience had shown the American Indian to have been neither "innocent" nor able to withstand the encroachments of civilization. A new and paradoxical concept of the Noble Savage therefore emerged--that of a being heroic but cruel, generous but vengeful, honest but immoderately passionate, and a man, above all, fated to be crushed by a higher culture which he did not understand and which did not understand him.Stone's Metamora is closest to the primitivistic tradition. The play contains little, if any, implication that the savage's way of life is inferior to that of the civilized man. In each of the romances discussed, however, just such an unfavorable implication is central to each author's treatment of the Indian. Yamovden, on the other hand, is a muzzling work which leaves the reader doubtful that Eastburn and Sands ever had a settled conception of the Noble Savage.Stone excepted, the writers studied were concerned about historicity and tried to base their treatment of the Indian, in part at least, upon authentic historical materials. Generally, they followed Puritan sources in order to Five a sense of realism to the background, a procedure plainly evident in the works when the narrations of several battles are compared with Puritan accounts. The writers did not hesitate, however, to depart from their sources when history contradicted the characterizations made necessary by romantic themes.The several works discussed show evidence of the influence exerted upon characterization and plot making by the literary conventions which dominated the popular writing of the early and middle nineteenth century. Most characters are stereotypes which fill roles in a standard plot in which the white heroine is endangered, rescued, then reunited with the white hero.The study was organized as follows: chapter one described the growth of enthusiasm for Indian subjects in America from 1815 through 1830; chapter two discussed the Noble Savage myth and its influence upon American writing; chapters three through seven examined Yamoyden, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, Metamora, Mount Hope, and The Doomed Chief as works representative of the general trends and influences discussed in the earlier chapters; and the conclusion summarized the study and attempted to formulate the writer's conclusions concerning the Indian's Place in American romanticism.

Thesis (M.A.) in English--University of Maine, 2001. / Includes vita.

This thesis seeks to grasp how King Philip's War influenced cultural evolution in Massachusetts in order to determine whether it produced a culture of violence and conflict amongst the Anglo-Puritan inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay colony following the conflict. Specifically, this work uses primary sources produced by European inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay to examine the period between 1676 and 1713. Chapter II examines the impact of King Philip's War on the evolution of colonists' attitudes towards Indians by tracing the development of scalp bounties in Massachusetts. The use of scalp bounties highlights a trend towards commoditizing Indian lives in New England, and King Philip?s War proves critical in directing that trend. Chapter III explores the results of King Philip's War on the relationship between Massachusetts and the metropole in London. This chapter focuses on the riot of April, 1689, in Boston, that removed the London-appointed leader of the Dominion of New England, a political entity created, in part, in response to the weak showing of colonial government during King Philip's War. This chapter highlights the diverging views of empire and authority between the Massachusetts colonists and the royal officials in London. Chapter IV analyzes conflict and change within colonial Massachusetts society in the wake of King Philip's War. Here, I find that the war had the smallest impact on the overall course of subsequent cultural development in the colony. This does not mean that the war had no impact at all, but rather that such impact did not stand out against other patterns of cultural influence such as religion and economics.

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No description available.

This thesis consists of a poem in the form of three related dramatic monologues in free verse. The subject of the poem is King Philip's War, an Indian war which took place in New England in 1675 and 1676. The central figures in the poem are the Indian leader, Metacom (King Philip); Benjamin Church, the Englishman responsible for Metacom's death; and Metacom's wife, Melia.

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.

<p>"The Afterlives of King Philip's War" examines how this colonial American war entered into narratives of history and literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and investigates how narrative representations of the War restructured both genre and the meaning of the historical event itself. This investigation finds its roots in colonial literature and history - in the events of King Philip's War and the texts that it produced - but moves beyond these initial points of departure to consider this archive as a laboratory for the study of the relationship between genre and knowledge on one hand, and literature and the construction of (proto-) national community on the other. Because of its unique place in the history of the colonies, as well as its positioning within literary studies of Puritan New England, King Philip's War is an example not just of how one community faced a crisis of self-definition, but how that crisis was influenced by, and in turn is reflected in, the literature it produced. In this conception, genre is more than literary form, but represents a social technology with implications for the broader production of knowledge: following the use and production of genre in narrative reveals both literary history and the complicated map of how narrative constructs knowledge in tension with the conventions of genre simultaneously hem in and catalyze reading.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisors: William J. Scheick and Katherine Arens. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.

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