Traditionally, the captivity narrative relates the tale of a white woman captured by Native Americans during colonial times. However, captivity narratives carried different meanings at different junctures in the history of America. During the Early Republic (1780-1830), the captivity experience became a highly popular theme in America’s emerging national literature and helped shape American identity at the same time as it allowed revised versions of the young nation’s past. In this course, we will examine the ways in which these “revisionist histories” of the young American nation simultaneously interrogate political authority and contribute to the formation of a national identity. Guiding questions will be:
- What dynamics of race, gender, and nationhood are at play in the novels’ renderings of captivity?
- How are the “American Self” and the “Other” constructed in these novels?
- What are the “dangers” of going native represented by these novels?
- How do these novels represent interracial relationships?
- In what ways does the captivity experience serve to solidify or, conversely, interrogate national mythologies?
In two of our sessions, we will also examine how Hollywood adapts James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans in the 1990s.
Please purchase and read the following novels: Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok (1824); James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826); Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (1827).
You can watch Michael Mann's 1992 film in the "Mediathek" (ask for the "Handapparat" for this class).