Caught Between Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction
Captivity narrative scholarship has exploded over the past several years, with the steady publication of new studies of the genre and new anthologies of the narratives themselves. As a result, the genre and its significance within an increasingly international literary history have undergone almost continual redefinition. Caught Between Worlds contributes to this ongoing redefinition by arguing that the captivity narrative begins as a British tradition of writing about being captured and held in Eastern lands by Oriental peoples. Since the vast majority of captivity scholarship concerns an American literature of Indian captivity, scholars will need to contend with Snader's provocative thesis and the difference it makes to dominant conceptions of the captivity genre.
Snader's study brings into view a large number of fascinating narratives and novels that have been largely overlooked by literary critics, and among other things his book offers an excellent bibliography and survey of captivity literature published in the British Isles. The disadvantage to covering such a large number of texts, of course, is that textual analysis in almost every case seems unfortunately curtailed, especially considering the densely complicated plots of most of these texts. At the same time, the book's broad coverage makes available to readers and scholars a wealth of significant but unstudied literature, such as the novelistic tradition of utopian captivity set in Africa, which Snader explores in his final chapter.
Caught Between Worlds devotes its first three chapters to captivity "in fact" and its second three to captivity "in fiction." The early chapters track the emergence of particular motifs and concerns in a handful of popular narratives, principally of Islamic captivity. Those texts reveal the genre's strategies for maintaining verisimilitude, for constructing paradigms of heroism, and for exploring the possibilities of transculturation. Throughout, Snader maintains the "precedence" (22) of this British tradition against the American tradition that has received so much more critical attention: "British captivity narratives set in other lands commanded not only greater priority but also greater length, broader production and distribution, a more consistent generic identity, and a larger impact on metropolitan culture" (22). Snader's critique of the exceptionalist and nationalist rhetoric within some Americanist treatments of Indian captivity is entirely accurate, and his insistence on recognizing the broader historical and geographic range of captivity literature is immensely valuable. But by fashioning such an overdrawn dichotomy between American and British traditions, his own study often seems in danger of reproducing the very biases he otherwise argues against, and it oddly recapitulates the imperialist ambivalence that forms the context for captivity literature itself.
For example, Snader notes that British captivity narratives offered a far more masculinist ethos than American ones, which frequently told stories of women held captive. But the British novels he studies in the book's later chapters very often place female protagonists into captivity episodes as a way to articulate feminist critiques of patriarchal culture. While such novels do reveal their reliance on strategies within early British narratives, this development also suggests a far more transatlantic paradigm of literary and cultural influence. Indeed, the tradition of captivity literature appears marked by more cross-national exchanges than Snader allows for, a possibility he raises when he speculates that the captivity narrative may be "a far more international genre than [Caught Between Worlds] has suggested" (289).
But alongside this more polemical argument posed by Snader is another argument about the captivity narrative's role in articulating an emergent modern liberal subject, in its depiction of an isolated, individuated, and interiorized self who comes into focus as a result of being held in captivity among "others." This may well be the more compelling and more convincing argument offered by Caught Between Worlds. Together with its extremely useful survey of largely unexplored captivity texts, this suggestive argument should make Caught Between Worlds attractive reading for students of British and American literature alike.
