In this work of literary history, Billy J. Stratton's principal focus is Mary Rowlandson's The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, the narrative of a Puritan minister's wife who spent three months in 1676 as a captive of the Narragansett Indians who had raided her village in the course of the Anglo-Indian struggle known as King Philip's War. First published in 1682, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God went through numerous editions on both sides of the Atlantic, becoming both the first “best seller” of colonial British America and a much-studied source for the history of Puritan New England, particularly with regard to the settlers’ relations with the indigenous peoples of the region. It remains a staple of courses in early American history and literature, and is the best known of the hundreds of Indian captivity narratives produced by white Americans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

But according to Stratton, this text, “the most influential and widely read account of Indian captivity in American literature” (6), which had a tremendous “discursive significance … in the shaping of literary representations of Native Americans” (11), has been misinterpreted and under-analysed by scholars who have failed to give appropriate consideration to questions of “Indigenous knowledge and Native critical theory” (12). Stratton engages a variety of strategies by which to bring out the “contested voices” referred to in his subtitle. In his first chapter, he makes the important, if not entirely new, argument that the Indian captivity narrative, rather than being the pure product of the experience of North American colonization, was extensively influenced by earlier “colonial discourses that had enjoyed a long and eminent place in the annals of Western literary history” (24). However, he undermines this thesis by collapsing all medieval and early modern European works of travel and exploration under the rubric of the captivity narrative, although the writings of friars such as Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and William of Rubruck seem far less suited to this category than those describing Europeans’ tales of capture by Turks and Moors. Stratton's next chapter centres on the dispossession and deterritorialization of Native New England's first peoples by the English, citing Rowlandson's narrative as a tool in this struggle, by which the “wilderness” inhabited by the Indians is represented as “a physical and spiritual void” (53) destined to be controlled and civilized by Puritan settlers. Here Stratton makes some valuable observations regarding the ways in which the Puritans portrayed the Indians as illegitimate presences in their own land, but this chapter would have been strengthened by at least some discussion of William Cronon's seminal Changes in the Land (1983). Similarly, engagement with important newer works such as Teresa Toulouse's The Captive's Position (2006) and Ann Little's Abraham in Arms (2007) would have added detail and nuance to Stratton's remaining two chapters on questions of authorship and historical awareness in Rowlandson's narrative; these scholars have much to say about the ways in which this text was produced, disseminated, and interpreted, and to what extent it reflects its author's actual experience of captivity among the Indians.

Buried in Shades of Night is a highly problematic book whose success is compromised by two major issues. First, it is never entirely clear which elements of Stratton's analysis are truly innovative, as he appears neither to have unearthed new materials nor to have adopted a sustained theoretical framework through which to reevaluate this canonical source, other than a sense that Native Americans were dealt with unfairly not only by Rowlandson and fellow Puritan writers such as Cotton and Increase Mather, but by unnamed American history textbooks and by the scholarship of countless practitioners not only of history and literature but also of cultural studies, gender studies and ecocriticism, who invariably “reinforce conventional representations of Native Otherness” (94). This contention raises the second problem: many of the works which Stratton, often rightly, criticizes are decades old and, while still valued, are seen as reflecting the intellectual and political climates in which they were produced. Certainly Perry Miller and Samuel Eliot Morison were, and are, “important historians,” but it is a bit disingenuous of Stratton to imply that these long-dead writers’ “non-existent” analyses of “Native subjectivities” (137) are indicative of the current state of play in the study of the indigenous peoples of colonial New England. Had Stratton engaged with the important recent work of, for example, Jean O'Brien, Birgit Brander Rasmussen and Lisa Brooks, he might have reconsidered his claim that the Native perspective on these struggles remains, after three and a half centuries, “buried in the shades of night” (94).