230514 Captivity Narratives in British and American Literature (S) (WiSe 2019/2020)

The captivity narrative is a heterogeneous literary genre that dates back to the fifteenth century, and generally (although there are important historical variations) depicts the abduction, treatment, and eventual return of a traveller, prisoner-of-war, or settler from captivity among a foreign people from an autobiographical point of view. Thus, the genre is a form of travel writing in which captivity tends to serve an ideological function in the fashioning of national identity and the construction of cultural, religious, and ethnic otherness. In this respect, captivity narratives tend to engage with relationships of us and them and therefore differ from traditional prison narratives in which prisoners and their othering within our own society is portrayed.
The most famous sub-genre is the so-called American Indian Captivity Narrative, which mainly comprises stories of (white) settlers who are taken captive and held by Native Americans. While those stories form an important part of early American Literature, the origins of the captivity narrative in its modern (English) form lie in stories about the abduction and enslavement of European sailors and travellers by North African pirates between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This class will provide an introduction to the most important (historical) forms of the captivity narrative.