1. See, for example, David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and his Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); David D. Hall, World of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Hall and Warner are particularly useful for explaining the importance of print in New England, while Brown offers the most detailed discussion of the means by which information was distributed in the colonies.

2. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

3. In Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), Donald Denoon identifies versions of exceptionalism in the historiography of such settler societies as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, which indicates that such exceptionalism is not unique to North America or even to British colonies. Ian Tyrrell, in "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History," American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1031-55, notes that "in an era of unprecedented internationalization in historiography, the legacies of nationalism and exceptionalism still haunt the study of American history" (1031). In our estimation, the only way to avoid the problem posed by the alternatives of nationalism and exceptionalism is to historicize nationalism. We have chosen to do so by showing that the discursive phenomena associated with exceptionalism can also be identified with the emergence of a modern middle class and thus with a new brand of nationalism in Europe. We thank Michael Denning for calling the work of Denoon and of Tyrrell to our attention.

4. Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), and J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), are among the most important of recent attempts to fix such an origin for the English novel.

5. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. William M. Sale, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958).

6. It is reasonable to ask how this heroine differed from the heroines of such Elizabethan plays as Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay or Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West . In Greene's play, for example, the inherent desirability of Margaret is meant to challenge the ideology of Petrarchanism that characterized Elizabethan romantic comedies. The prince's son falls in love with Margaret, the keeper's daughter, only to pass her on to the Earl of Lincoln, whom she really adores, and who woos her much as if the royal gaze itself has given her new value. Unlike the heroines of eighteenth-century domestic fiction, Margaret does not bring her values with her into the aristocratic household when she marries. Much the same elevation of a woman to aristocratic status occurs in The Fair Maid, where Bess the bar girl undergoes a trial of her chastity and fidelity. In neither play is the commoner allowed to transform aristocratic culture; aristocratic culture transforms the girl. For a discussion of how Jacobean city comedies modified these conventions, and yet in their use of the nonaristocratic female were different from eighteenth-century novels, see Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 154-71.

7. As in preceding centuries, sleeping arrangements in the early eighteenth century might place two or more unrelated people of different sexes and classes in the same bed. J. M. Beattie describes the case of a clerk accused of "assault with intent to ravish" his master's young daughter "with whom he shared a bed in his master's house. The child had been found 'inflam'd and excoriated' and was discovered to have the clap. [The clerk] had blamed it on a ten-year-old boy who also slept with them, but a doctor testified that it was not possible such a Youth should contract the foul Disease and give it to a child." Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 127-28. This was one of the few cases of rape prosecuted during the eighteenth century. The fact of three people sleeping together was not considered unusual. Beattie contends that, during the eighteenth century, such cases were unlikely to be brought to court unless the victim were a child. A study of Old Bailey indictments indicates the same lack of legal attention to rape at the very time when Richardson wanted readers to consider a sexual assault the gravest threat to a woman's identity. Of seventy-three victims on record, "seventy-one were females.... More than half were under the age of eleven years; it is not clear," the study concludes, "why cases of alleged rape of adults seldom came to trial." Thomas R. Forbes, Surgeons at the Bailey: English Forensic Medicine to 1878 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 88. We thank Susan Sage Heinzelman for calling this study to our attention.

8. It should be noted that Pamela's parents have enough education to write good standard English; Richardson included their letters among those being assembled as models for young women to imitate. Equally important, apparently Pamela's father once owned property. He writes to her, "We are, 'tis true, very poor, and find it hard to live; though once, as you know, it was better with us"

(5). This makes Pamela's station as a servant relatively fluid. It does not, however, place her in the social group that, according to Lawrence Stone and Jeanne Fawtier Stone, allowed its members to fall in and out of respectability through marriage and ownership of property. According to their An Open Elite? England, 1540-1880 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), the gentry was an extremely fluid social group from which one could decline by necessity to the status of a merchant, and to which tradesmen could rise, given sufficient prosperity. In 1710, Richard Steele is quoted as claiming, "as did many others before and after him, that 'the best of our peers have often joined themselves to the daughters of very ordinary tradesmen upon ... valuable considerations' " (20). Pamela is not of this station; but even if she were potential gentry (as Clarissa is), her desirability as a wife to someone decidedly above her would remain essentially the same. Her decline according to one system of values—that associated with the "old" society, and especially with an older middle class—occurs simultaneously with her rise according to another system of values (private virtue, companionship, femininity), associated with the new class and its rise to hegemony.

9. Defoe's On Religious Courtship (1722) can be regarded as an exception to this rule. That the text was neither received as fiction nor recuperated by literary criticism later on testifies, we feel, to its lack of the features we are identifying with captivity narratives.

10. In their influential treatise Practical Education, Maria and her father Robert Edgeworth recommended Robinson Crusoe as more suitable reading for girls than boys. "To girls this species of reading cannot be as dangerous as to boys: girls must soon perceive the impossibility of their rambling about the world in quest of adventure" (111). Their logic has another side. Just as it was assumed young ladies would never imagine imitating Crusoe's economic adventure, so it was understood that the female readers could benefit from the example of a hero who assembled a self-enclosed household where money was not the most important thing.

11. Ian Watt acknowledges his inability to explain why the puritanical Richardson should have made "his entry into the history of literature by a work which gave a more detailed account of a single intrigue than had ever been produced before." If their economic interests are what define them as a group, why indeed should the new business-oriented readership have been so interested in the protracted seduction of a nonaristocratic female? The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 172.

12. In his study Before Novels, Hunter identifies most of the kinds of writing that went into the novel and whose characteristics we locate in captivity narratives—the didactic guide book, the spiritual autobiography, sensational journalism, tales of wonder, and travel books. We would argue that, although all the ingredients for the novel were certainly in English culture before novels, the recipe for combining them had to be developed outside the geographical boundaries of modern England. The novel is, from this perspective, a colonial formation.

13. For the place of domestic fiction in the middle-class hegemony, see Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, pp. 59-95.

14. See R. W. G. Vail, The Voice of the Old Frontier (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), pp. 29-61.

15. There is considerable evidence that Jesuit accounts were rarely intended for a general readership. Father Jogues begins his narrative with this explanation as to why he chose to write in Latin rather than French: "Reverend Father in Christ—the Peace of Christ. Wishing, as I do, to write your reverence, I hesitate first in which language to address you, after such long disuse, almost equally forgetful of both, I find equal difficulty in each. Two reasons, however, induce me to use the less common idiom. I shall be better able to use the words of Holy Scripture.... I also wished this letter to be less open to all." "Captivity of Father Isaac Jogues, of the Society of Jesus, Among the Mohawks," in Held Captive by Indians, ed. Richard VanDerBeets (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), pp. 4-5.

16. The material of these anti-tales could be found in letters and official documents concerning captives who chose not to return when given the choice, as reported by Alice C. Baker in True Stories of New England Captives (Cambridge: E. A. Hall, 1897) and Emma Lewis Coleman in New England Captives Carried to Canada between 1677 and 1760 during the French and Indian Wars, 2 vols. (Portland, Maine: Southworth Press, 1925). Such accounts provided the basis for a paragraph in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) that details the exchange of prisoners. The treaty gave those who converted to Catholicism during their captivity the choice of remaining in Canada.

17. We are summarizing here the information in Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, "The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century," Early American Literature 23 (1988): 239-61, and in Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier .

18. We rely on Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier, for these details of the printing history of Rowlandson's account.

19. Cotton Mather, for example, reported the accounts of Mehetable Goodwin, Mary Plaisted, and Mary Ferguson in his sermons, and transcribed that of Hannah Swarton; see Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier .

20. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that the same bundle of discursive features that made England fall in love with Pamela took the colonial readership by storm within a few years of that novel's success in England. Furthermore, she describes Richardson's narrative in terms that support our model of the captivity narrative and its political effects: "Novels of social realism, Pamela and Clarissa ... focused on the plight of the woman/individual in the harsh commercial world, be it the world of domestic service or of the eighteenth century's heartless marriage market. In both novels, the virtuous young woman is cut loose from the protection of family and friends. Finally, problematizing both class and the family, these novels privileged the woman as writer and the empowering nature of her words." "Misprisioning Pamela: Representations of Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century America," Michigan Quarterly Review 26 (1987): 21.

21. In "The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of the Puritan Captivity Narrative," American Literary History 3 (1991): 1-26, Tara Fitzpatrick distinguishes the narratives that featured female captives as those which posed a peculiar problem for Puritan divines: "They vacillated, at once decrying the sinfulness of the generation that had tempted God's fury by straying from the 'hedge' of the covenanted community and then extolling the enlightenment accessible only to those whom God had chosen to try by fire in the wilderness" (9). This double-edged theological message was apparently all the more problematic because the messenger was a woman (5). We are suggesting that the very qualities posing a theological problem for these divines solved an ideological problem for an emergent colonial culture. Fitzpatrick neglects to account for the fact that in novels that observed the Rowlandson model, these women were "authors" rather than prophetic speakers. They narrated their own histories, histories of themselves not only as Christians in relation to God but also—and perhaps more importantly—as Englishwomen who demonstrated the power of their kind of literacy in the midst of a non-English culture. No matter that they, much like Pamela, were ventriloquized or filtered through the writings of one or another male. They nevertheless existed in print and persisted for readers as the female source of a distinctively British American experience.

22. We feel justified in drawing this equation between Indian captivity and slavery because there is a striking resemblance between these seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century descriptions of captivity and the language that would later be found in African-American slave narratives. The similarities include references to one's captor as "master," the representation of the captive as someone who no longer owns her or his own body, comparisons between the captive and a beast of burden, and the fact that the writer had been seized under conditions resembling war. These same features identify the slave in the political discourse of the seventeenth century as someone who does not have to be considered a man.

23. The heritage of captivity narratives sheds some light on why the English in India responded to the mutiny of 1857 with tales of rape when there was little evidence of sexual violence. English readiness to characterize a native insurrection against the colonial government as involving the rape and massacre of innocents can be attributed to a tradition of representing English colonialism, not as aggression on the Europeans' part, but as a situation where the native population threatened the lives and virtues of English women and children, putting Englishness itself at risk. This narrative tradition clearly gathered strength after eighteenth-century fiction had turned the threat to the English captive into a sexual threat.

24. Mary Rowlandson was captured by Algonquins. Her master was a Narragansett and the squaw with whom Rowlandson lived was a Pocasset. The narrative, however, does not distinguish among the Algonquins but lumps them together as Indians. In recent years, scholars have tried to avoid this generic category. We have retained it in order to remain faithful to Rowlandson's practice. We refer to her captors as she does, as belonging to a single nation rather than to different tribes. It should be noted that the important difference for her was not racial (red versus white) but national (Indian versus English). For a discussion of this point, see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978), pp. 3-25, and Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 5.

25. Captivity accounts by Hannah Swarton, Hanna Dustan, Elizabeth Hanson, John Williams, and John Gyles are among those which set the English off against the Indians, French, and Catholics. After being a slave to two successive Indian masters, Gyles was apparently sold to a French master. His narrative frequently notes differences between the English and the Indians, the English and the ''Papists," and the English and the French. When his French mistress hears an English force is likely to attack her region, she asks Gyles not to reveal where valuables are hidden. "Madam," he replies, "it is contrary to the nature of the English to requite evil for good. I shall endeavor to serve you and your interest." "Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, etc. in the Captivity of John Gyles," in Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724, ed. Alden T. Vaugh and Edward W. Clark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 129. A comment by Williams indicates the degree to which he assumed that retaining one's Englishness during captivity depended on retaining the language: "We have reason to bless God who has wrought deliverance for so many, and yet to pray to God for a door of escape to be opened for the great number yet behind, not much short of an hundred, many of which are children, and of these not a few among the savages and having lost the English tongue, will be lost and turn savages in a little time." "The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion," in Puritans among the Indians, p. 225. On second-generation captivity narratives see Roy Harvey Pearce, "The Significances of the Captivity Narrative," American Literature 19 (1949): 1-20 and Tara Fitzpatrick, "The Figure of Captivity," 1-26.

26. The power that traditionally accrued to English colonial discourse when it seemed to issue from the body of a victim is discussed in "Introduction: Representing Violence; or, 'How the West Was Won,'" in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1-26.

27. "A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson," in So Dreadfull a Judgement: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676-1677, ed. Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), p. 335.

28. "A Narrative of Hannah Swarton Containing Wonderful Passages Relating to Her Captivity and Deliverance," in Puritans among the Indians, p. 154.

29. This European practice of seeing non-European landscapes as blank was not confined to the Americas. According to J. M. Coetzee, from 1652 to the end of the eighteenth century, European writers frequently found the South African landscape illegible. They did not regard the Hottentots as having any culture, because their way of life lacked European features much as the landscape did. "Idleness in South Africa," in Violence of Representation, pp. 119-39.

30. In The Lay of the, Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), Annette Kolodny describes the relationship of English subjects to the North American landscape in terms that exactly invert the way gender actually operates in the captivity narratives we have been discussing. Indeed, one might even understand the puritan captivity narrative as rewriting the lush pastoralism that first attracted earlier settlers to Virginia. Where that landscape was represented as a fecund female nature that could be captured and improved by a contrastingly masculine European culture, the New England landscape that Rowlandson describes is either inert and lifeless or else seething with demonic masculinity. When the colonial subject is female, by implication colonial control of such a landscape has to be imagined in terms of labor and domestication rather than capture and rape.

31. Precisely the sort of narrative that bases national identity on a print vernacular rather than on a sacred text would distinguish the New World nation from its Old World counterpart. Benedict Anderson suggests that the difference between the Christian nation and the modern nation is a matter of what one would die for. The newer idea of the nation "is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship." Imagined Communities, p. 16.

32. In his extensive study, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), Mitchell Robert Breitwieser argues that Rowlandson's work is realistic because it "is an account of experience that breaks through or outdistances her own and her culture's dominant means of representation, and because it is itself a continuation of that breakthrough rather than a fully composed and tranquilized recollection" (10). By reading Rowlandson as a modern subject, Breitweiser inadvertently supports our contention that Rowlandson's style of narration exceeds the historical limitations of her time because it provided the basis for the English novel and thus for later styles of psychological realism.

33. In a paper entitled "Red, Black, and Female: Constituting the American Subject," presented at the University of California Humanities Institute Research Seminar on Poststructuralism and History (1990), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that the masculine representation of imperialism, in which America is a supine woman, changed decisively in the nineteenth century to one in which America is a captive woman. We wish to thank her for sharing that manuscript with us.

34. David Hall notes that in seventeenth-century New England the word illiterate signified an ignorance of Latin: "By this standard, all but a mere handful of the colonists were illiterate. Yet, though ordinary people were excluded from the world of Latin, they were comfortably acquainted with the language of their Bibles. To be sure, many wrote with difficulty, or not at all. But when defined as the skill of reading English, literacy was almost universal." World of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 32. E. Jennifer Monaghan argues that a substantial percentage of women in Colonial America could read but could not sign their names, in "Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England," in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 53-80. Margaret Spufford has made a similar argument with regard to England, in Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 22-35.

35. Elizabeth Hanson, "God's Mercy Surmounting Man's Cruelty," in Puritans among the Indians, p. 237.

36. Ellen Lansky first called this resemblance to our attention. We are very much in her debt for this insight.

37. Quoted in Derounian, "Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century," p. 244.

38. Quoted in ibid., p. 249.

37. Quoted in Derounian, "Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century," p. 244.

38. Quoted in ibid., p. 249.

39. In Shamela, one of the many lessons Oliver draws from Pamela is: "All Chambermaids are strictly enjoyned to look out after their Masters; they are taught to use little Arts to that purpose: And lastly, are countenanced in Impertinence to their Superiors, and in betraying the Secrets of Families." Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, with Shamela and Related Writings, ed. Homer Goldberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 305. In The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 270, Ian Watt discusses Fielding's conservative view—his belief in a "class fixity"—as the basis for a fundamental difference between Richardson's novels and those by Fielding.

40. In Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973) Richard Slotkin makes the important observation that "whereas early emigration and Indian war tracts portrayed English colonization metaphorically as Exodus—the journey of Israel from a fallen Egypt to the Promised Land—the captivity narratives portrayed it as a figurative Babylonian captivity, an exile from a lost, conquered, and debased promised land of England" (93). We would simply add that the promised "return" is an essential feature of the biblical prophecies that were directed at the faithful who were carried off into captivity in Egypt, Assyria, or Babylon. See, for example, Amos 9:13-15, Isaiah 10:20-23, and Jeremiah 23:1-6.

41. In "The Figure of Captivity," Fitzpatrick compares Rowlandson's account with the later narrative of John Williams. She notes that where "the atomizing tendencies of the woman's narratives had challenged the theological unity, now a man's narrative would recreate that unity on political and increasingly rationalistic grounds" (18-19). She notes further how "striking [it is] that women were among the leading creators of a mythology that has since had so resonantly masculine a voice'' (20). The operations of gender in this narrative cease to cause bewilderment, however, as Armstrong has argued in Desire and Domestic Fiction, pp. 1-27, once one is willing to entertain the possibility that the modern subject was not only first and foremost a writing subject but also a woman who could claim no political power save that of literacy alone. Our comparison of Rowlandson with Richardson argues that this was the case in England as well as in North America. Both of these narratives use the woman to dramatize the rise to hegemony of writing over speech.

42. Breitwieser has discussed Rowlandson's inability to reintegrate with the community upon her return as her inability to complete the mourning process. American Puritanism, pp. 119-29.

43. Slotkin notes that the popularity of captivity narratives peaked between 1680 and 1716, and that between 1680 and 1720 three out of the four bestsellers in America were captivity narratives (the fourth was The Pilgrim's Progress ). And, he writes, "even after 1720 the tales of captivity continued to be popular, although they shared the market with other types of narrative; and the first tentative American efforts at short fiction and the 'first American novel' (Brown's Edgar Huntly ) were very much in the vein of captivity narratives." Regeneration through Violence, pp. 95-96.

44. In discussing Richardson's influence on nineteenth-century American fiction and on the reform movement, Smith-Rosenberg notes: "Indeed, the family does not transform Pamela; instead Pamela, as the upwardly mobile individual, transforms the family, making both her parents' family and Mr. B's family middle class.... Just as Pamela never goes home again to her parents' poor cottage, a person, transformed into an individual by the new commercial economy, could no longer return to the family—unless she transforms it in turn." "Misprisoning Pamela, " p. 22.

45. Renato Rosaldo, "Imperialist Nostalgia," in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 68-87.

46. We are drawing here on Homer Obed Brown's forthcoming book, Institutions of the English Novel (Oxford University Press). We thank him for allowing us to read the chapter on the process by which nineteenth-century writers created a place in the canon for Defoe.

47. We were encouraged to pursue our present course of argument by Cathy N. Davidson's statement, "Everyone knows that the first American fiction imitated earlier British originals, but we are not so sure just what that means. Did 'the American novel' imitate 'the British novel' (phrases which assume each national product was monolithic and the influence equally so)? Or did Charles Brockden Brown imitate William Godwin? ... Yet Godwin in his 1817 Preface to Mandeville acknowledged his debt to Brown, and Brown was also credited with influencing Godwin's daughter, Mary, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley." Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 10. However, Davidson focuses on how American writers used the conventions of the English novel as "a political and cultural forum"; she does not ask how conventions of the American novel might have been used by English authors as a political and cultural forum back in England.

48. in The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Michael Davitt Bell encapsulates the dominant view: "The story of British influence on American fiction is fascinating and important, but it is not the whole story. What seems even more fascinating—to me, as ... to many others—is the story of how British models were transformed, transmuted, or regenerated by American conditions" (4). Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), makes a singular effort to bring the captivity narrative to bear on a discussion of the American novel (140-48). In doing so, however, he does not challenge the prevailing belief that the English novel was the literary prototype of the American novel.