A01=Barbara A. Mortimer
American Captivity Narrative
American Film History
American identity studies
Annette Kolodny
Author_Barbara A. Mortimer
Barbara Mortimer
Big Man
Captive's Age
Captivity Episode
Captivity Myth
Captivity Narrative
Captivity Plot
Category=NH
cultural transformation in American movies
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
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eq_non-fiction
Female Captive
Frontier Hero
Gaylyn Studlar
gender and sexuality in film
Hero's Initiation
indigenous representation cinema
Lunatic Fringe
masculinity critique movies
narrative agency theory
postcolonial film analysis
Reunion Scene
Revenge Western
Running Wolf
Savage Captor
STOL Aircraft
Taxi Driver
Uncommon Valor
Vietnam War Films
Western Film Genre
White America
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9781138971929
- Weight: 360g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jul 2016
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The captivity narrative, the earliest genre of American popular literature, continues to be of cultural significance in late 20th-century Hollywood. Many popular films of the last four decades incorporate the most common elements of the captivity narrative tradition, including a politically contested frontier setting and a plot involving innocent, family-oriented white Americans held captive by hostile, culturally alien natives. At the same time, these films offer something new to the narrative tradition: they focus on the captive who resists rescue and the challenge this resistance poses to American cultural self-confidence. By focusing on the lost captive, these films, beginning with The Searchers (1956), deal with questions about American identity raised by a white American's cultural and potentially political transformation. Films as diverse as Little Big Man, Taxi Driver, and The Deer Hunter adapted the captivity narrative's conventions to criticize aspects of contemporary American society and reject outworn models of male heroism; at the same time, however, they retained the genre's traditional assumption of white superiority and its fear of female sexuality. Bibliography. Index.
