The American Indian Quarterly · 1974 · 15 citations · 0 references
HumanitiesAnthropologyHistoryNarrative StudiesNative American StudiesWomen's HistoryBlack Women's LiteratureEarly American LiteratureIndigenous HistoriesIndigenous LiteratureNative American LiteratureWomen WritersBlack Women In LiteratureCaptive PlayEnslavement NarrativesIndigenous Historical NarrativesNarrative Of EnslavementNative American Women's LiteraturePostslavery Literature
Among the early white settlers, accounts of Indian captivities and massacres became America's first literature of catharsis - a means by which a population that disapproved of fiction and play-acting could satisfy its appetite for stories about other people's misfortunes. This collection of unaltered captivity narratives, first published in 1973, remains an invaluable source of information for historians and ethnologists, providing a fascinating glimpse of a vanished era. For this edition, VanDerBeets has written a new preface discussing the proliferation of recent scholarship about captivity narratives, especially those written by women.