New World writing and captivity narratives

The three- quarters of a century following 1640 represent a crucial turning point in the exploration and settlement of the so- called ‘New World’. Correspondingly a new type of prose literature was produced in this period, reflecting England’s growing confidence in conceptually controlling the region, which accompanied her uncertainty about what colony and empire would mean for the mother country. This chapter will discuss two ways of understanding the New World literature written in English, during this period: firstly, the domestic versus imperial discourse and secondly, the flowering of the use of the trope of racial difference used by authors confronting the ‘others’ in the region. First, though, a word about the region itself. Although the ‘New World’ is a phrase that was current in the seventeenth century when describing the American hemisphere, its Eurocentric formulation has been increasingly problematic to historians and literature scholars in recent times. Much of the work on the development of European colonies in the Americas during the early modern period now uses the conceptual framework of the Atlantic World, a region bounding an ocean, in which national boundaries are less significant than broader regional, cross- cultural continuities and changes.1 This chapter will discuss English authors travelling in and writing about North America, the Caribbean, and Central America. To be truly Atlantic, it must also acknowledge the emergence of Africa in the literature of the English, and this will be touched upon briefly in the discussion of black slavery. [...]