Helen Hunt Jackson Denise Chavez Andrea Tinnemeyer
"If I could write a story that would do for the Indian a thousandth part of what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for the Negro," wrote Helen Hunt Jackson, "I would be thankful the rest of my life." Jackson surpassed this ambition with the publication of Ramona, her popular 1884 romantic bestseller. A beautiful half Native American, half-Scottish orphan raised by a harsh Mexican ranchera, Ramona enters into a forbidden love affair with a heroic Mission Indian named Alessandro. The pair's adventures after they elope paint a vivid portrait of California history and the woeful fate...
"If I could write a story that would do for the Indian a thousandth part of what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for the Negro," wrote Helen Hunt Jackson...
Andrea Tinnemeyer's book examines the nineteenth-century captivity narrative as a dynamic, complex genre that provided an ample medium for cultural critique, a revision of race relations, and a means of elucidating the U.S.-Mexican War's complex and often contradictory significance in the national imagination. The captivity narrative, as Tinnemeyer shows, addressed questions arising from the incorporation of residents in the newly annexed territory. This genre transformed its heroine from the quintessential white virgin into the Mexican maiden in order to quell anxieties over miscegenation,...
Andrea Tinnemeyer's book examines the nineteenth-century captivity narrative as a dynamic, complex genre that provided an ample medium for cultural cr...