AMONG the First Literary Genres to Be Published In
Rewriting the Captivity Narrative for Contemporary Children: Speare, Bruchac, and the French and Indian War sara l. schwebel MONG the first literary genres to be published in the A English New World, the captivity narrative holds a special place in the American canon. Its central themes— identity and belonging, civilization and savagery, “purity” and miscegenation—weave their way through the origin stories of the United States. Because questions of possession and nativity animate tales of both captivity and the nation’s birth, captivity narratives perform the cultural work of nation building particu- larly well. Who rightfully owns the land, they ask? Holds the key to “correct” living? Commands the moral high ground? It is to be expected, then, that captivity narratives proliferated during the early republic, gained new life as western adventure stories during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and continue to be produced and circulated in children’s literature today, even 1 as the United States embraces a multicultural ideal. Captivity narratives have continually evolved to meet the needs of readers. Although James Fenimore Cooper’s master work The Last of the Mohicans has lost favor among twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans, in part because of its 1 Historical novels centered on captivity and its aftermath have long been popular in children’s literature. Well-known examples include French and Indian War stories— Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison (1941), Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest (1953), Sally M. Keehn’s IAmRegina(1991), and Scholastic’s Dear America title, Standing in the Light: The Captive Diary of Catherine Carey Logan (1998), and Deerfield stories—Mary P.
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