“Renegades”

Anna Diamantouli provides a dedicated survey of Barbary captivity narratives published in the United States during the late eighteenth century, aiming to elucidate both the prevalence and significance of the literary figure of the renegade. Before the background of the tension between the United States and North Africa, which will soon culminate in the Barbary wars, the renegade becomes an avatar of possibilities or alternatives for individual and nation self-fashioning. By juxtaposing the literary transformations of the renegade figure in fiction with authentic descriptions of converts in personal memoirs and eyewitness accounts, this essay sketches a picture of cultural hybridity oscillating between literary stereotypes and individual experiences.