Pirates, Captives, and Conversions: Rereading British Stories of White Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean

AbstractWhile captivity narratives have long been recognized as an important field of research in American Studies, the substantial body of autobiographical tales portraying captivity in the Muslim world published in England between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth century has only recently begun to attract the attention of literary scholars. Despite a number of important pioneering works, however, British captivity narratives have not only remained at the margins of early modern studies, but even where they have received attention they have mainly been treated as historical source material. In other words, there has hardly been any interest in the genre of captivity narratives as a textual and literary phenomenon in its own right. As a consequence, most of the published stories in question lack thorough narrative analysis, although the genre is situated at the intriguing intersection of travel literature, religious writing (e. g. tales of martyrdom), and prose fiction, and arguably constitutes one of the forerunners of the early novel. This paper proposes that we need to go beyond the limits of current research by rereading British tales of captivity with a stronger interest in their narrative composition, their discursive and generic contexts, and the pragmatics of publishing. Only in this way it will be possible to both do justice and draw more sustained attention to this highly fascinating and yet still understudied genre of literary texts.