McNamara Taylor Mission

It bears mentioning that Puritan spiritual autobiography was not exclusively confined to prose narrative. Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, who also wrote short first-person prose statements, are among those who wrote poetry that falls within the boundaries of this genre. In their historical and cultural contexts, from the late seventeenth through the middle of the eighteenth century, Indian captivity narratives occupied religious, propagandistic, and sentimental spaces in early American autobiography. The first ones tended to focus on the religious dimensions of captive experience, while later ones became a vehicle for promulgating white hatred of Native Americans and made -31- an argument for Indian removal. The Puritans, believing themselves God's chosen people on a mission to establish the New Zion on this continent, equated Native Americans with the devil, creatures for them to exterminate from the land in a righteous cause. Infusions of melodrama into captivity narratives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made them factually exaggerated sensational horror fictions ...»