Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction examines four novels by Erna Brodber, Zoé Valdés, Sandra Cisneros, and Maryse Condé. In this unique comparative analysis, Kristina S. Gibby explores the significance of female ghosts—specifically maternal figures, who haunt female narrators, inspiring them to transcribe the dead’s obfuscated (hi)stories and recover their family memory. The author argues that these female ghosts subvert historiographic power structures through a matrilineal succession of knowledge via oral traditions of storytelling, inevitably broadening historical consciousness and asserting the value of fiction in the face of historical rupture. Gibby contends that in form and content, these novels disrupt patriarchal and Western expectations of time and epistemology. They favor cyclical temporality (highlighted by the spirits’ uncanny return), which underscores relational understanding and challenges the exclusive and limiting constraints of linear time. This book makes important contributions to inter-American literary criticism with its narrow focus on female authors who confront the horrors of history through maternal spirits.

Defining male envy as "the hostility males feel for other males," the author explores how envy, while a taboo topic in everyday life, has (from the Romantic period onward) been given a thorough treatment by literature and looks at what that treatment reveals about the role of envy in competition, warfare, and civilization. Discussing works ranging from Ivanhoe to The Shining he looks at envy as a coded subtext inherent in a vast range of human conflict. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Medicine Woods is a graceful and soul-stirring meditation on how our planet's future lies in the ability to embrace the oneness of life and practice nonviolence toward each other, the trees, the seas, and all beings. In this second collection of awe-inspiring poetry, Danita Dodson uplifts the ecological stewardship that obliges us to seek healing in its many forms--to walk in the woods, to cure waters, to return the soil to its original state of health, to mend broken hearts and minds, to give justice to the oppressed. With perceptive musicality and stunning natural imagery, the poet offers the spirit of what her grandmother sought when she ventured into the East Tennessee woods to find medicinal plants to heal her family--poems that carry an imaginative ethnobotanical essence as they distill curative words in this time of climate change and escalating violence. Uniting the natural and the divine and connecting the hills of Appalachia with the planetary landscape, Dodson's mystical verses exemplify the wisdom of a poet with a love of place, illuminating the deep connection to the land that underlies the desire to love it, to protect it, and to listen to its stories.

Exploring the relationship between culture and health, this text provides readings of the works of five women writers, tracing their common structure of a main character moving from a state of mental or physical disease toward wellness through reconnection with her cultural traditions.

Ivor Goodson and Scherto Gill analyse and discuss a series of trans-disciplinary case studies from diverse cultures and argue that narrative is not only a rich and profound way for humans to make sense of their lives, but also in itself a process of pedagogical encounter, learning and transformation. As pedagogic sites, life narratives allow the individual to critically examine their 'scripts' for learning which are encapsulated in their thought processes, discourses, beliefs and values. Goodson and Gill show how narratives can help educators and students shift from a disenfranchised tradition to one of empowerment. This unique book brings together case studies of life narratives as an approach to learning and meaning-making in different disciplines and cultural settings, including teacher education, adult learning, (auto)biographical writing, psychotherapy, intercultural learning and community development. Educators, researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines will find the case studies collected in this book helpful in expanding their understanding of the potential of narrative as a phenomenon, as methodology, and as pedagogy.

At the heart of any therapeutic encounter there is always a story. Patients seeking help bring with them stories, spoken or untold, fragmentary and whole, that collectively make up their own personal narrative, their lived autobiography. Whatever else their tasks, a central part of the doctor's or therapist's job is to facilitate the telling of these stories, to make meaning out of them and find the patterns within them. The aim of this book is to rehabilitate stories and story telling within medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy and to consider a narrative approach both as a theoretical paradigm and a practical, therapeutic tool.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Since the 1968 publication of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, a new generation of Native American storytellers has chosen writing over oral traditions. While their works have found an audience by observing many of the conventions of the mainstream novel, Native American written narrative has emerged as something distinct from the postmodern novel with which it is often compared. In Dreams of Fiery Stars, Catherine Rainwater examines the novels of writers such as Momaday, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich and contends that the very act of writing narrative imposes constraints upon these authors that are foreign to Native American tradition. Their works amount to a break with—and a transformation of—American Indian storytelling. The book focuses on the agenda of social and cultural regeneration encoded in contemporary Native American narrative, and addresses key questions about how these works achieve their overtly stated political and revisionary aims. Rainwater explores the ways in which the writers "create" readers who understand the connection between storytelling and personal and social transformation; considers how contemporary Native American narrative rewrites Western notions of space and time; examines the existence of intertextual connections between Native American works; and looks at the vital role of Native American literature in mainstream society today.

Among the Weyewa of the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, spokesmen seek to inscribe their traditions and sacred obligations through ritual speaking performances. In a series of lively poetic dialogues, performers use a distinctive couplet style to pursue the trail of their ancestors.

In this anthology, eighteen scholars discuss the themes and practices of survivance in literature, examining the legacy of Vizenor's original insights and exploring the manifestations of survivance in a variety of contexts. Contributors interpret and compare the original writings of William Apess, Eric Gansworth, Louis Owens, Carter Revard, Gerald Vizenor, and Velma Wallis, among others.

The Canadian public largely understands reconciliation as the harmonization of Indigenous–settler relations for the benefit of the nation. But is this really happening? The Theatre of Regret asks whether reconciliation politics will ultimately favour the state’s goals over those of Indigenous peoples. Interweaving literature and art throughout his analysis, David Gaertner questions the state-centred frameworks of reconciliation by exploring the critical roles that Indigenous and allied authors, artists, and thinkers play in defining, challenging, and refusing settler regret. Through close examination of core concepts in reconciliation theory – acknowledgement, apology, redress, and forgiveness – this study exposes the deeply embedded colonial ideologies at the root of reconciliation in Canada.