Search - Bound and Determined : Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (Women in Culture and Society Series)

Bound and Determined Captivity CultureCrossing and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst - Women in Culture and Society Series
Author: Christopher Castiglia

In Bound and Determined, Christopher Castiglia gives shape for the first time to a tradition of American women's captivity narrative that ranges across three centuries, from Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson's abduction by Narragansett Indians to Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. — Examining more than sixty accoun...  more »ts by women captives, as well as novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's eighteenth-century classic Rueben and Rachel to today's mass-market romances, Castiglia investigates paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find freedom from stereotypical roles as helpless, dependent, sexually vulnerable, and xenophobic. In their condemnations of their non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny, and instead finds in them an appeal of a much different nature: as all-too-rare stories of imaginative challenges to rigid gender roles and racial ideologies.

Whether the women of these stories resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or eventually choose to live among their captors, they end up with the power to be critical of both cultures. Castiglia shows that these compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent explorations of cultural divisions and differences, have significant implications for current critical investigations into the construction of gender, race, and nation.  « less

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ISBN-13: 9780226096520
ISBN-10: 0226096521
Publication Date: 2/15/1996
Pages: 268
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Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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