ABSTRACT
The more thoroughly secular narratives, all deriving from the fourth intercolonial war, reflect the development in the mid-eighteenth century of new "structures of feeling" grounded in the empiricism and moral philosophy of the eighteenth century in emergent American nationalism. In Revolutionary discourse the British were criticized for failing to protect the colonists against Indians, and this illustration portrays colonial militancy and self-reliance. A Narrative of the sufferings and surprising deliverance of William and Elizabeth Fleming was published in six English and three German editions in 1756. Elizabeth Fleming's complete isolation is new in the captivity literature, for previous female captives were generally too frightened to escape. There is a considerable gap between Peter Williamson's self-fashioning through articulating the experience of captivity and that of Mary Row-landson seventy-five years previously. Their narratives may be taken as expressing not only two different modes of interpretation—providential and secular—but also two different structures of feeling.
