Explore the vast range of titles available.

Teaching Charlotte Lennox’s Harriot Stuart (London, 1750) and Euphemia (London, 1790) offers a transatlantic perspective of the New York region and its diverse population of African Americans, Native Americans, and European Americans as understood from a British woman novelist who lived in New York in the 1740s during the time in which both novels are set. In addition to this diversity, her novels demonstrate the conflicts and networks within this part of America, all of which can be explored through historical and geographical contexts of contemporaneous maps. These maps not only engage the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) focus that many colleges and universities are adopting but also engage affect and memory through contemporaneous allegorical maps, and extend to opportunities for students to create their own maps.

It is amusing to imagine how Eliza Wharton’s travails in The Coquette might have concluded had she been tweeting instead of scrawling letters, quill in hand, or perhaps whether Mary Rowlandson would have made a podcast of her narrative, each remove described in a weekly episode wilder than the one before, had the internet only been invented 250 years earlier.

This article explores the concept of restorative reading, defined as a practice in which sacred texts are read for affective assurances of previously established religious convictions, as it is described in A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). I identify nine scenes of restorative reading in the narrative, and interpret each of them through a theological framework constructed by readings of the major Puritan theologians William Perkins, William Ames, John Preston, and Richard Baxter and with attention to the Augustinian Christian tradition to which their thinking on religious emotions is indebted. The article contends that Rowlandson participates in the Puritan theological discourse on the affections as much by writing from it as by living it out, and that her narrative furthermore preserves, though it antagonistically misreads, Indigenous understandings and uses of the emotions. The arguments in this article can be best understood in the context of discourses on the postsecular and the postcritical in literary studies.

In both the historical and contemporary contexts, women's narratives of abduction and captivity have played varied roles, serving as memoirs and sources of inspiration, shaping images of social problems, and promoting social policies. This essay uses sociological tools to examine the reflexive relationships that facilitate these roles. The social conditions and concerns of an era produce symbolic codes used in personal narratives of captivity, making a unique experience widely understood. The process of abstraction transforms diverse experiences of captivity into generic cases. Taken up by the media and other public realms, these cases become social problems. The reflexivity made possible through symbolic codes and abstraction reveal how the experience of captivity has influenced social change.

The most widely used image of Hearst was one of idyllic bourgeois domesticity, cropped from the announcement of her engagement in the media-which, ironically, provided her would-be captors with the address to the couple's Berkeley home. The reporter Lacey Fosburgh notes that prior to captivity, Hearst \"selected chinaware and silver patterns\" and \"look[ed] forward to living a peaceful existence in which she would pot plants, grow vegetables, get married, have children, buy antiques and be happy.\" Nancy Armstrong argues that the ideological project of the captivity narrative had an immense influence on the development of both the American and English domestic novel, noting that the \"imagined community\" created by these narratives is \"the basis at once for a new concept of nationality and for a new ruling class\" (376).4 In addition to Armstrong's work on captivity narratives, there is a large body of critical work from scholars such as Rebecca Blevins-Faery, Christopher Castiglia, Cathy Rex, Gordon Sayre, and Susan Scheckel that attests to the foundational role of captivity narratives in the development of the imagined community of American national identity. Drawing on the work of the theorists cited above, I analyze the firstperson fictions of Dorothy Bryant and Marilyn French, which emerged like that of other feminist writers, such as Sue Kaufman, Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy, and Lisa Alther, alongside the consciousness-raising circles of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s, to describe how narratives of the American housewife's political awakening revise early American captivity narratives and chart the protagonist's progress from captivity within the oppressive grip of domesticity to a new consciousness and some level of personal (albeit limited) liberation.

Tales of captivity have dominated the digital streaming universe in recent years even as the captivity narrative has proven to be a malleable genre: from the dark dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale which powerfully depicts the horrors of survival in a world in which women are reproductive slaves, to WestWorld, set in a virtual game park recreation of captivity narratives past, a bleak commentary on the fascination narratives of the American western hold for eager guests who are unaware of the rebellion brewing among captive hosts, to the 1980s world of Stranger Things, whose first season focuses on the tale of two abducted children, and Orange is the New Black a show devoted to America’s largest captive population, the mass incarcerated, and in its last season, the detainees of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The period was marked by a cultural anxiety created by sensationalized tales of abduction and abuse by day care providers, such as a 1990 Newsweek article on “the dark side of daycare” that prominent feminist scholar Susan Faludi emphasized in her influential 1991 bestseller Backlash: The Undeclared War on Women, which linked the popularity of this new genre of captivity narrative to a backlash against second-wave feminism and its quest to liberate women from imprisonment in the domestic space (57). According to Fox, this narrative construction denies the audience the voyeurism which permeates other expressions of the genre. Despite attempts in 2019 by the Trump government and the far right to depict migrants as aggressors threatening the porous borders of an embattled nation, the current prevalence of “images of children in cages surrounded by US immigration officials,” Armstrong argues, “suggests that the captivity narrative is once again gathering together the historical materials at hand in order to resituate the question of national identity on an international terrain.”