Date of Award

1-1-2016

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences

First Advisor

Billy J. Stratton, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Tayana Hardin

Third Advisor

Jeffrey Lin

Keywords

Captivity memoirs, Incarceration memoirs, Narratives

Abstract

The captivity genre has a rich history in fiction and memoir. In this work, I argue that the expansive parameters of the captivity genre should include an additional subset of texts: incarceration memoirs. Working with two canonized Indian captivity narratives - Mary Rowlandson's Sovereignty and the Goodness of God and Sarah Wakefield's Six Weeks in the Sioux Teepees - and two contemporary incarceration memoirs - Stanley Tookie Williams' Blue Rage, Black Redemption and Sanyika Shakur's Monster - I suggest that, across a range of thematic and contextual metrics, incarceration memoirs participate in the captivity genre. These equivalences include: the abduction of the narrator within a larger zone of violent conflict, and the power struggles - frequently over resources and territorial boundaries - that occasion capture, the acclimation to a different culture by the captive and the development of skills to survive, and the shaping role of captivity on personal identity through isolation, violence, friendship, and education, and how these features contribute to a "conversion" experience.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Vincent James Carafano IV

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

94 p.

Discipline

English Literature

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