Bound and determined : captivity, culture-crossing, and white womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Bound and determined : captivity, culture-crossing, and white womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst
(Women in culture and society : a series / edited by Catharine R. Stimpson)
University of Chicago Press, 1996
- : pbk
Available at / 15 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Bibliography: p. [219]-229
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This work provides an analysis of a tradition of American women's captivity narrative that ranges across three centuries, from Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson's abduction by Narragansett Indians to Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Examining more than 60 accounts by women captives, as well as novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's 18th-century classic "Rueben and Rachel" to modern mass-market romances, the author investigates paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find freedom from stereotypical roles as helpless, dependent, sexually vulnerable and xenophobic. In their condemnations of their non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny, and instead finds in them an appeal of a much different nature: as all-too-rare stories of imaginative challenges to rigid gender roles and racial ideologies.
Whether the women of these stories resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or eventually choose to live among their captors, they end up with the power to be critical of both cultures. Castiglia shows that these compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent explorations of cultural divisions and differences, have significant implications for current critical investigations into the construction of gender, race and nation.
Table of Contents
Series Editor's Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction: Captivity Is Consciousness: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and the Revision of Identity 1: A More Interesting Adventure: Critics, Captives, and Narrative Dissent 2: Her Tortures Were Turned into Frolick: Captivity and Liminal Critique, 1682-1862 3: That Was Not My Idea of Independence: The Captivity of Patty Hearst 4: The Wilderness of Fiction: From Captivity Narrative to Captivity Romance 5: Captives in History: Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel 6: A Hostage in the House: Domestic Captivity and Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie Conclusion: Contemporary Captives Notes References Index
by "Nielsen BookData"