1st Edition

Native American Literature Towards a Spatialized Reading

By Helen May Dennis Copyright 2007
    248 Pages
    by Routledge

    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    1. Preliminaries: Felicitous Spaces, Infelicitous Places, and Eulogized Space 2. Tribal Feminism after Modernism: Paula Gunn Allen. The Woman Who Owned the Shadows 3. Ephanie’s Case. Against adverse forces 4. Narrative as ritual: Leslie Marmon Silko. Ceremony 5. The World of Story in the Writings of Leslie Marmon Silko and Linda Hogan 6. Telling Testimony: Linda Hogan. Power. 1998 7. Narratives of Healing: Linda Hogan. Solar Storms 8.Lighting Out for the Territory: Janet Campbell Hale. The Jailing of Cecilia Capture 9. Autodiegetic Narration: Betty Louise Bell. Faces in the Moon 10. Homing in: Revisiting the Paradigm 11. Indian Homing as Healing Ceremony 12. Homing in: Transforming the Paradigm 13. Narrative Authority in the Ozhibi’ganan Novels

    Biography

    Helen May Dennis is a 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. She is the mother of three grown children, a grandmother and a poet.