Master Narratives: Captivity and Nineteenth-Century American Autobiographical Writing, 1816-1861.

Abstract

ABSTRACT

MASTER NARRATIVES: CAPTIVITY AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING, 1816-1861

by

Keith Michael Green

Chair: Sidonie Smith

This dissertation examines the relationship between the historical fact of captivity and the production of autobiographical and biographical writing in the U.S. from 1816-1861. It seeks to read this narrative production as a coherent whole and relate it to larger narratives of national, racial and social identity formation. Previously, this body of literature has been read as a disconnected set of individual captivity genres: Indian captivity accounts, North African captivity narratives, African American slave narratives, and prison narratives. And while historical and discursive links are sometimes acknowledged, no study has yet to analyze this body of literature as an internally consistent collective. Furthermore, these narratives have been understood as rehearsals of captives’ privation, annihilation, and domination. Consequently, the stories and writings that make up America – this reading maintains – are only negatively defined by tropes of submission, bondage, and captivity. In contrast, my study argues that captivity actively informs the production of autobiographical writing and self-representations as American. What is more, it contends that the context and thematics of captivity were fundamental to the operations of autobiographical writing, national subjectivity, gendered identity, and racial identity in the antebellum U.S. Ultimately, it makes plain the indebtedness of antebellum literary production to captivity and insists on a complex and redemptive notion of bondage in nineteenth-century American writing.