“The American equivalent of the Grub Street criminal biography,” Roy Harvey Pearce wrote about the Indian captivity narrative in his 1947 essay, paving the way for the critical assumption that the genre had little to recommend it but its relative influence on later male writers. Today's seminal scholarship in the field views “the significances of the captivity narrative,” to evoke Pearce's essay title, as nothing but incidental. Placing Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative center stage in transatlantic literary history as the prototype of the Richardsonian novel, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse suggest that “one has to go to America…to understand where English novels come from.” Armstrong and Tennenhouse thus call for a paradigm shift in English and American literature, arguing that “most scholars and critics still assume that American literature originated in England. By the time they enter our classrooms, students already know how to read Pamela and Clarissa, much as we ourselves did, as the prototype both for English domestic fiction and for the American novel, from Rowson and Cooper to Hawthorne and James.” This chapter enters into the critical debate on the captivity narrative by focusing on the English-born Susanna Rowson, whose transatlantic life and literary career have been obscured in both national canons: on the American side of the Atlantic “she stands as an early canonical figure, while on the [British] she languishes in obscurity.” Rowson's Slaves in Algiers (1794) and Reuben and Rachel (1798) – the former a play modeled on the Barbary captivity narrative, the latter a novel structured around the Indian captivity narrative and its Richardsonian version – are hybrid texts which allow us to reconsider some of the generic and disciplinary assumptions which underlie traditional programs in English and American literature.

Once regarded as a unique American genre, often called upon to support the logic of American exceptionalism, the captivity narrative is now increasingly being recognized by historians and literary critics as a transatlantic phenomenon. In Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850, historian Linda Colley highlights the need for a comparative transatlantic approach to the study of the Indian captivity narrative, situating the genre within the context of the seventeenth-century Barbary captivity narrative:

If Colley recontextualizes the Indian captivity narrative within the seventeenth-century English Barbary narrative, Paul Baepler brings the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American Barbary captivity narratives to the forefront of captivity studies with his anthology White Slaves, African Masters. Directing our attention to this understudied body of captivity narratives, Baepler argues that the American Barbary narrative, the Indian captivity narrative, and the slave narrative are generically interconnected and ought to be discussed in a shared discursive realm. Gordon M. Sayre likewise advocates a shared interpretive approach, suggesting that future scholarship should concentrate on the notion of the renegade and carry out “a transnational, comparative analysis of the differences between captors and captives.” Joe Snader, on the other hand, seeks to inscribe the significance of the British captivity narratives in literary history. Responding to Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, who define the genre as “‘one of America's oldest literary genres and its most unique,’” Snader “want[s] to assert the temporal and indeed the logical priority of the British tradition over the American in order to examine how the former influenced the latter as well as the points of divergence between them.” While Snader retreats from this somewhat hierarchical model of “influence” by seeing the captivity genre not “as a genre that belongs to any particular nation of origin,” his approach invites a few words on the methodological concerns of this chapter. I am mostly concerned with examining dialogic textual relationships as opposed to proving the assumed influence of one national literature on another, the method characteristic of the traditional discipline of comparative literature. As Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor note, the problem here is that the “‘influence’ story assumes hierarchical forms of connection that answer to a politically- and culturally-inflected historicism, in which a dominant (prior) position exerts power and imposes uniformity on a subdued other.” Manning and Taylor suggest that “Hans Jauss's perception that literary history needs to be understood in terms of ‘dialogue as well as process’ would seem to lend itself well to transatlantic literary studies.” We may also fruitfully read captivity literature within Mary Louise Pratt's “‘contact’ perspective,” a term developed to account for imperial travel writings, which “emphasizes how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.” Aligning itself with criticism which departs from isolationist national and generic paradigms, this chapter views the captivity narrative as a hybrid genre emerging from encounters in the “contact zones” of the Atlantic world.