SOURCE: "The Captivity Narrative as Children's Literature," in The Markham Review, Vol. 8, Fall, 1978, pp. 54-59.

In the following essay, Levernier maintains that nineteenth-century captivity narratives written specifically for children and young adults were intended to convey moral, religious, and political lessons.

Between 1820 and 1860 the wave of cultural nationalism that profoundly affected the writings of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne also influenced literature written primarily for America's rising generation of young people. Prior to the 1820s, American children's literature had been, as R. Gordon Kelly notes, "simply a variant of English taste" but the spirit of achievement, pride, and cultural satisfaction that spread throughout America during the decades preceding the Civil War gave shape to a type of children's literature that, according to John C. Crandall, reflected "the nationalistic spirit which nurtured it."¹ Affirmations of the American Dream—stories of frontier life and adventure, biographies of...