The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions
by Paula Gunn Allen
from Beacon Press
This pioneering work, first published in 1986, documents the continuing vitality of American Indian traditions and the crucial role of women in those traditions.
The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology
by Robert Bringhurst
from Counterpoint
Native-American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (Harpercollins Literary Mosaic)
The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
from Cambridge University Press
This Companion provides an informative and wide-ranging overview of a relatively new field of literary-cultural studies: literature of many genres in English by American Indians from the 1770s to the present day. In addition to the seventeen chapters written by respected experts--Native and non-Native; American, British and European scholars--it includes bio-bibliographies of forty authors, maps, suggestions for further reading, and a timeline which details major works of Native American and mainstream American literature, as well as significant social, cultural and historical events.
The Companion to Native American Literature provides an informative and wide-ranging overview of a relatively new field of literary-cultural studies, covering literatures in English by American Indians of many genres from the 1770s to present day. In addition to the seventeen chapters written by respected experts--Native and non-Native; American, British and European scholars --the Companion includes bio-bibliographies of forty authors, maps, suggestions for further reading, and a timeline which details major works of Native American literature and mainstream American literature, as well as significant social, cultural and historical events.
American Indian Literary Nationalism
by Jace Weaver
from University of New Mexico Press
In a contentious field characterized by divergence of opinion, American Indian Literary Nationalism intervenes in recent controversial debates on the role of hybridity, suggesting common sense strategies rooted in the material realities of various communities. These essays deal with issues the authors have been wrestling with throughout their careers.
Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior, assert being a "nationalist" is a legitimate perspective from which to approach Native American literature and criticism. They consider such a methodology not only defensible but also crucial to supporting Native national sovereignty and self-determination, an important goal of Native American studies, generally.
However, the authors do not believe the nationalism suggested in American Indian Literary Nationalism is the only possible approach to Native literature. Each invites Natives and non-Native allies who support tribal national sovereignty and nationalist readings of Native literature to join the discussion.
With this writing, each author acknowledges and honors the foundational contribution of Simon Ortiz in his 1981 MELUS essay, "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism." It has been over thirty-five years since academe has accepted the legitimacy of American Indian literature. Weaver, Warrior, and Womack now call for more Native voices to articulate literary criticism and for clearer thinking about what links the literature to Native communities.
Mesoamerican Voices: Native Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Yucatan, and Guatemala
from Cambridge University Press
Translated into English, these texts were written from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries by Nahuas from central Mexico, Mixtecs from Oaxaca, Maya from Yucatan, and other groups from Mexico and Guatemala. This collection provides college teachers and students access to important new sources for the history of Latin America and Native Americans. It is the first to present the translated writings of so many native groups and to address such a variety of topics, including conquest, government, land, household, society, gender, religion, writing, law, crime, and morality.
Mesoamerican Voices presents a collection of indigenous-language writings from the colonial period, translated into English. The texts were written from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries by Nahuas from central Mexico, Mixtecs from Oaxaca, Maya from Yucatan, and other groups from Mexico and Guatemala. The volume gives college teachers and students access to important new sources for the history of Latin America and Native Americans. It is the first collection to present the translated writings of so many native groups and to address such a variety of topics, including conquest, government, land, household, society, gender, religion, writing, law, crime, and morality.
Approaches to Teaching Delillo's White Noise (Approaches to Teaching World Literature)
from Modern Language Association of America
The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Indigenous Americas)
by Thomas King
from Univ Of Minnesota Press
Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (Women in Culture and Society Series)
by Christopher Castiglia
from University Of Chicago Press
Examining more than sixty accounts by women captives, as well as novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's eighteenth-century classic Rueben and Rachel to today's mass-market romances, Castiglia investigates paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find freedom from stereotypical roles as helpless, dependent, sexually vulnerable, and xenophobic. In their condemnations of their non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny, and instead finds in them an appeal of a much different nature: as all-too-rare stories of imaginative challenges to rigid gender roles and racial ideologies.
Whether the women of these stories resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or eventually choose to live among their captors, they end up with the power to be critical of both cultures. Castiglia shows that these compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent explorations of cultural divisions and differences, have significant implications for current critical investigations into the construction of gender, race, and nation.
Native American Fiction: A User's Manual
by David Treuer
from Graywolf Press
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.
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