Abstract
As an analysis of an episode in John Underhill's Newes from America (1637) illustrates, early New England colonists construed wartime captivity among Native Americans in light of biblical precedents. The best known of the colonial English captivity narratives, Mary Rowlandson's Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), articulates this “typological” interpretation by representing her reading of her Bible while among her Algonquian captors. However, while her story seems to parallel the Old Testament sacking of Jerusalem and the carrying-away of the Jews as captives to Babylon, captivity narratives developed as a profuse and popular early American genre, representing a variety of experiences. In general, captivity narratives served as wartime propaganda, but some, like those of James Smith, Mary Jemison, and John Tanner, sympathetically represent the perspectives of captives adopted by Indians.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | A Companion to American Literature |
| Publisher | wiley |
| Pages | 89-104 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781119056157 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781119146711 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 1 2020 |
Keywords
- Adoption
- Captivity
- Colonial New England, 1630–1830
- King Philip's War
- Mary Rowlandson
- Puritans
- Requickening
- Typology
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