Early American Literature, January 1st, 2003
I propose to conceptualize the setting for early American captivity narratives as the "literacy frontier": the area of contact between cultures with widespread literacy and those with little or no exposure to reading and writing. Unlike other partitive, thematic formulations of frontier, such as Kathleen Brown's "gender frontier," the "literacy frontier" is defined by an attribute that pertained with putative exclusivity to the colonizers--literacy as the sine qua non of Western civilization--and therefore suggests a one-sided perspective. (1) In this essay I am primarily concerned with the vi...
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