Native American literature explores divides between public and private cultures, ethnicities and experience. In this volume, Joseph Coulombe argues that Native American writers use diverse narrative strategies to engage with readers and are ‘writing for connection’ with both Native and non-Native audiences. Beginning with a historical overview of Native American literature, this book presents focused readings of key texts including: • N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn • Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony • Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart • James Welch’s Fool’s Crow • Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven • Linda Hogan’s Power. Suggesting new ways towards a sensitive engagement with tribal cultures, this book provides not only a comprehensive introduction to Native American literature but also a critical framework through which it may be read.

Who in a society can speak, and under what circumstances? These questions are at the heart of both Native American literature and feminist literary and cultural theory. Despite the recent explosion of publication in each of these fields, almost nothing has been written to date that explores the links between the two. With Feminist Readings of Native American Literature, Kathleen Donovan takes an important first step in examining how studies in these two fields inform and influence one another. Focusing on the works of N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, and others, Donovan analyzes the texts of these well-known writers, weaving a supporting web of feminist criticism throughout. With careful and gracefully offered insights, the book explores the reciprocally illuminating nature of culture and gender issues. The author demonstrates how Canadian women of mixed-blood ancestry achieve a voice through autobiographies and autobiographical novels. Using a framework of feminist reader response theory, she considers an underlying misogyny in the writings of N. Scott Momaday. And in examining commonalities between specific cultures, she discusses how two women of color, Paula Gunn Allen and Toni Morrison, explore representations of femaleness in their respective cultures. By synthesizing a broad spectrum of critical writing that overlaps women's voices and Native American literature, Donovan expands on the frame of dialogue within feminist literary and cultural theory. Drawing on the related fields of ethnography, ethnopoetics, ecofeminism, and post-colonialism, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature offers the first systematic study of the intersection between two dynamic arenas in literary studies today.

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.

This book provides the historical framework for the shift in Native American literary studies away from cultural analyses toward more politically inflected and motivated perspectives, and examines the key moments in this turn.

An informative and wide-ranging overview of Native American literature from the 1770s to present day.

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

This new collection reveals the vitality of the intellectual and creative work of Native women today. The authors examine the avenues that Native American women have chosen for creative, cultural, and political expressions, and discuss the points of convergence between Native American feminisms and other feminisms. Individual contributors articulate their positions around issues such as identity, community, sovereignty, culture, and representation. This engaging volume crystallizes the myriad realities that inform the authors' intellectual work, and clarifies the sources of inspiration for their roles as individuals and indigenous intellectuals, reaffirming their paramount commitment to their communities and Nations. It will be of great value to Native writers as well as instructors and students in Native American studies, women's studies, anthropology, cultural studies, literature, and writing and composition.

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.

Over the course of the last twenty years, Native American and Indigenous American literary studies has experienced a dramatic shift from a critical focus on identity and authenticity to the intellectual, cultural, political, historical, and tribal nation contexts from which these Indigenous literatures emerge. The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature reflects on these changes and provides a complete overview of the current state of the field. The Handbook's forty-three essays, organized into four sections, cover oral traditions, poetry, drama, non-fiction, fiction, and other forms of Indigenous American writing from the seventeenth through the twenty-first century. Part I attends to literary histories across a range of communities, providing, for example, analyses of Inuit, Chicana/o, Anishinaabe, and Métis literary practices. Part II draws on earlier disciplinary and historical contexts to focus on specific genres, as authors discuss Indigenous non-fiction, emergent trans-Indigenous autobiography, Mexicanoh and Spanish poetry, Native drama in the U.S. and Canada, and even a new Indigenous children's literature canon. The third section delves into contemporary modes of critical inquiry to expound on politics of place, comparative Indigenism, trans-Indigenism, Native rhetoric, and the power of Indigenous writing to communities of readers. A final section thoroughly explores the geographical breadth and expanded definition of Indigenous American through detailed accounts of literature from Indian Territory, the Red Atlantic, the far North, Yucatán, Amerika Samoa, and Francophone Quebec. Together, the volume is the most comprehensive and expansive critical handbook of Indigenous American literatures published to date. It is the first to fully take into account the last twenty years of recovery and scholarship, and the first to most significantly address the diverse range of texts, secondary archives, writing traditions, literary histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field.

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.