E-Book Overview
Native American Literature underwent a Renaissance around 1968, and the current canon of novels written in the late twentieth century in American English by Native American or mixed-blood authors is diverse, exciting and flourishing. Despite this, very few such novels are accepted as part of the broader American literary canon. This book offers a valuable and original approach to contemporary Native American literature. Dennis’s contemplation of space and spatialized aesthetics is compelling and persuasive. Considering Native American literature within a modernist framework, and comparing it with writers such as Woolf, Stein, T.S Eliot and Proust results in a valuable and enriching context for the selected texts. Vital reading for scholars of Native American Literature, this book will also provide good grounding in the subject for those with an interest in American and twentieth century literature more generally.
E-Book Content
Native American Literature Native American Literature considers a selection of post-war novels by Native American writers, including well known, canonical works such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, as well as lesser known but equally enjoyable texts, such as Janet Campbell Hale’s The Jailing of Cecelia Capture and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms. Believing in the possibility of communicating across cultural boundaries, Native American Literature offers a series of readings that focus on the act of understanding imaginatively texts by Native American and mixedblood authors that address and educate a global readership. The book offers introductions to major novels, such as Paula Gunn Allen’s The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, Silko’s Ceremony and Linda Hogan’s Power, based on strategies of close, attentive reading. Having demonstrated the principle of imaginative, empathetic reading by the general reader, Helen May Dennis builds on these initial readings to explore in more detail the impressive range of narrative strategies employed in this body of works. Her final chapter, on the novels of Louise Erdrich, uses narratology as a tool for analysis. In so doing, she explores Erdrich’s sophisticated blend of oral storytelling traditions with aspects of modernist writing, and her remarkable construction of a novel cycle that relates a fictionalized version of Ojibwe history of the late twentieth century. This book interweaves questions of narratology with a wide-ranging discussion of the themes of felicitous and infelicitous spaces. The author concentrates on the different representations of cultural spaces, on themes of displacement and homelessness, and on the inscription of mixed-blood identity that internalizes the trope of the conflictual frontier zone. In addition, this study dwells on the fragility and power of individual and cultural memory as it is depicted in these novels. The book demonstrates that a judicious mix of imaginative and informed acts of interpretation permit the non-Indian reader to achieve spatialized readings of these novels, i.e. readings that read text in context and in depth. Throughout, the author enacts a practice of cross-cultural reading, which employs a diversity of strategies to respond appropriately to this burgeoning canon of Native American literature. Helen May Dennis is Senior Lecturer in North American Literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published on Elizabeth Bishop, Willa Cather, H.D., Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, medieval Provençal poetry, gender in American literature and culture, and North American women writers. Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature Edited by Susan Castillo University of Glasgow In an age of globalization, it has become increasingly difficult to characterize the United States as culturally and linguistically homogenous and impermeable