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These essays provide a historical and critical view of Native American literary materials from early myths and legends to contemporary novels and short stories. The essays are organized in three groups, beginning with an introduction placing them within the broad context of extant scholarship. The first section on historical and methodological perspectives deals with the mythology and folk tales of North American Indians, the structure of Zuni myth, the Clackamas Chinook myths, Canadian Cree narratives, and Chamula (Mexican) speech and performance. The section on traditional literature covers creation tales, trickster tales, and Eskimo poetry. The section on literature in English focuses on contemporary fiction--N.S. Momaday's House Made of Dawn, J. Welch's Winter in the Blood, and L. Silko's Ceremony. ISBN 0-8161-8687-1: $32.50.
A collection of essays discussing early American Indian authors.
In an original, widely researched, and accessibly written book, Robert Dale Parker helps redefine the study of Native American literature by focusing on issues of gender and literary form. Among the writers Parker highlights are Thomas King, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ray A. Young Bear, some of whom have previously received little scholarly attention.Parker proposes a new history of Native American literature by reinterpreting its concerns with poetry, orality, and Indian notions of authority. He also addresses representations of Indian masculinity, uncovering Native literature's recurring fascination with restless young men who have nothing to do, or who suspect or feel pressured to believe that they have nothing to do. The Invention of Native American Literature reads Native writing through a wide variety of shifting historical contexts. In its commitment to historicizing Native writing and identity, Parker's work parallels developments in scholarship on other minority literatures and is sure to provoke controversy.
The outpouring of Native American literature that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning House Made of Dawn in 1968 continues unabated. Fiction and poetry, autobiography and discursive writing from such writers as James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko constitute what critic Kenneth Lincoln in 1983 termed the Native American Renaissance. This collection of essays takes the measure of that efflorescence. The contributors scrutinize writers from Momaday to Sherman Alexie, analyzing works by Native women, First Nations Canadian writers, postmodernists, and such theorists as Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack. Weaver’s own examination of the development of Native literary criticism since 1968 focuses on Native American literary nationalism. Alan R. Velie turns to the achievement of Momaday to examine the ways Native novelists have influenced one another. Post-renaissance and postmodern writers are discussed in company with newer writers such as Gordon Henry, Jr., and D. L. Birchfield. Critical essays discuss the poetry of Simon Ortiz, Kimberly Blaeser, Diane Glancy, Luci Tapahonso, and Ray A. Young Bear, as well as the life writings of Janet Campbell Hale, Carter Revard, and Jim Barnes. An essay on Native drama examines the work of Hanay Geiogamah, the Native American Theater Ensemble, and Spider Woman Theatre. In the volume’s concluding essay, Kenneth Lincoln reflects on the history of the Native American Renaissance up to and beyond his seminal work, and discusses Native literature’s legacy and future. The essays collected here underscore the vitality of Native American literature and the need for debate on theory and ideology.
This work is a collection of critical essays on the fiction and scholarship of one of Native America's most loved and respected writers. Drawing on her Chippewa and German-American heritage, Erdrich has produced a body of work whose pervasive mythical landscape and the cast of interconnected characters has been credited with bringing Native American literature to the literary mainstream and inspiring an entire generation of Native American writing. Her eleven North Dakota novels constitute a web of complex, absorbing narratives documenting familial, political and social histories over a century of tumultuous change. Erdrich's blending of Native oral and western traditions demand multilayered critical approaches. The essays relate to different issues relevant to her fiction, in particular the categorization of her work as Native American, but also questions about genre, gender, structure, narrative voice, authorship, and the ethics and politics of fiction labeled as Native American. Peter G. Beidler's essay, for example, investigates the use of medical terms as source of humor in Four Souls. Tom Matchie in his essay explores parallels between use of grotesque in Erdrich and Flannery O'Connor. Alan R. Velie examines dialectics of the Indian aesthetics and western literary forms in her fiction. Annette Van Dyke in her study of Agnes-Damien's role in The Last Report shows how the reader's perspectives change with a change in Agnes's role. Deborah L. Madsen and Barbara Hiles Mesle explore Erdrich's fiction from the perspective of trauma theory in the Native American context. Harry J. Brown's essay on the function of naming in her fiction, Holly Messitt in his comparative study of early American captivity narratives and Erdrich's fiction, David T. McNab in his study of death and dying in her fiction-all hint at the possibility of scholarship that Erdrich's fiction can spawn.
Although much contemporary American Indian literature examines the relationship between humans and the land, most Native authors do not set their work in the "pristine wilderness" celebrated by mainstream nature writers. Instead, they focus on settings such as reservations, open-pit mines, and contested borderlands. Drawing on her own teaching experience among Native Americans and on lessons learned from such recent scenes of confrontation as Chiapas and Black Mesa, Joni Adamson explores why what counts as "nature" is often very different for multicultural writers and activist groups than it is for mainstream environmentalists. This powerful book is one of the first to examine the intersections between literature and the environment from the perspective of the oppressions of race, class, gender, and nature, and the first to review American Indian literature from the standpoint of environmental justice and ecocriticism. By examining such texts as Sherman Alexie's short stories and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead, Adamson contends that these works, in addition to being literary, are examples of ecological criticism that expand Euro-American concepts of nature and place. Adamson shows that when we begin exploring the differences that shape diverse cultural and literary representations of nature, we discover the challenge they present to mainstream American culture, environmentalism, and literature. By comparing the work of Native authors such as Simon Ortiz with that of environmental writers such as Edward Abbey, she reveals opportunities for more multicultural conceptions of nature and the environment. More than a work of literary criticism, this is a book about the search to find ways to understand our cultural and historical differences and similarities in order to arrive at a better agreement of what the human role in nature is and should be. It exposes the blind spots in early ecocriticism and shows the possibilities for building common groundÑ a middle placeÑ where writers, scholars, teachers, and environmentalists might come together to work for social and environmental change.
An entirely new approach to reading, understanding, and enjoying Native American fiction This book has been written with the narrow conviction that if Native American literature is worth thinking about at all, it is worth thinking about as literature. The vast majority of thought that has been poured out onto Native American literature has puddled, for the most part, on how the texts are positioned in relation to history or culture. Rather than create a comprehensive cultural and historical genealogy for Native American literature, David Treuer investigates a selection of the most important Native American novels and, with a novelist's eye and a critic's mind, examines the intricate process of understanding literature on its own terms. Native American Fiction: A User's Manual is speculative, witty, engaging, and written for the inquisitive reader. These essays—on Sherman Alexie, Forrest Carter, James Fenimore Cooper, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch—are rallying cries for the need to read literature as literature and, ultimately, reassert the importance and primacy of the word.
The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature engages the multiple scenes of tension — historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic — that constitutes a problematic legacy in terms of community identity, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, language, and sovereignty in the study of Native American literature. This important and timely addition to the field provides context for issues that enter into Native American literary texts through allusions, references, and language use. The volume presents over forty essays by leading and emerging international scholars and analyses: regional, cultural, racial and sexual identities in Native American literature key historical moments from the earliest period of colonial contact to the present worldviews in relation to issues such as health, spirituality, animals, and physical environments traditions of cultural creation that are key to understanding the styles, allusions, and language of Native American Literature the impact of differing literary forms of Native American literature. This collection provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It supports academic study and also assists general readers who require a comprehensive yet manageable introduction to the contexts essential to approaching Native American Literature. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of this literary culture. Contributors: Joseph Bauerkemper, Susan Bernardin, Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, Kirby Brown, David J. Carlson, Cari M. Carpenter, Eric Cheyfitz, Tova Cooper, Alicia Cox, Birgit Däwes, Janet Fiskio, Earl E. Fitz, John Gamber, Kathryn N. Gray, Sarah Henzi, Susannah Hopson, Hsinya Huang, Brian K. Hudson, Bruce E. Johansen, Judit Ágnes Kádár, Amelia V. Katanski, Susan Kollin, Chris LaLonde, A. Robert Lee, Iping Liang, Drew Lopenzina, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Deborah Madsen, Diveena Seshetta Marcus, Sabine N. Meyer, Carol Miller, David L. Moore, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Mark Rifkin, Kenneth M. Roemer, Oliver Scheiding, Lee Schweninger, Stephanie A. Sellers, Kathryn W. Shanley, Leah Sneider, David Stirrup, Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., Tammy Wahpeconiah
Scholars and readers continue to wrestle with how best to understand and appreciate the wealth of oral and written literatures created by the Native communities of North America. Are critical frameworks developed by non-Natives applicable across cultures, or do they reinforce colonialist power and perspectives? Is it appropriate and useful to downplay tribal differences and instead generalize about Native writing and storytelling as a whole? ø Focusing on Dakota writers and storytellers, Seneca critic Penelope Myrtle Kelsey offers a penetrating assessment of theory and interpretation in indigenous literary criticism in the twenty-first century. Tribal Theory in Native American Literature delineates a method for formulating a Native-centered theory or, more specifically, a use of tribal languages and their concomitant knowledges to derive a worldview or an equivalent to Western theory that is emic to indigenous worldviews. These theoretical frameworks can then be deployed to create insightful readings of Native American texts. Kelsey demonstrates this approach with a fresh look at early Dakota writers, including Marie McLaughlin, Charles Eastman, and Zitkala-?a and later storytellers such as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Ella Deloria, and Philip Red Eagle. ø This book raises the provocative issue of how Native languages and knowledges were historically excluded from the study of Native American literature and how their encoding in early Native American texts destabilized colonial processes. Cogently argued and well researched, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature sets an agenda for indigenous literary criticism and invites scholars to confront the worlds behind the literatures that they analyze.
Although American Indian poetry is widely read and discussed, few resources have been available that focus on it critically. This book is the first collection of essays on the genre, bringing poetry out from under the shadow of fiction in the study of Native American literature. Highlighting various aspects of poetry written by American Indians since the 1960s, it is a wide-ranging collection that balances the insights of Natives and non-Natives, men and women, old and new voices.