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In this study of collaborative writing in western American literature, Linda K. Karell asks broad and fruitful questions about how writing in general is produced. By examining "collaboration" both as a process and as a product, she challenges the definition of an author as an individual genius who creates original works of art in isolation. From a collaborative view, what was a fairly direct cause and effect scenario (individual author + inspiration = original literary masterpiece) becomes something much less clear. An individual is always located within a shifting context of texts from which he or she draws to produce?often with substantial and varied support from other writers, editors, sp...
The two fields of contemporary Native American literature and culture exist in the tension between two literary traditions: the Native oral and literary tradition and the modern Western mainstream literary influence. In her North Dakota quartet Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), Native American mixedblood author, Louise Erdrich (b. 1954) exemplifies where and how these traditions meet and interact. A postmodern reading of the quartet shows that Native American authors and literary critics alike need not be afraid to tread into postmodernism, since an interpretation from this perspective opens up the possibility of freeing Native American lite...
This study portrays how Louise Erdrich’s writing extends Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and the novel through an investigation of a selection of her works, as well as her practices of writing, co-writing, re-writing, and reading novels. Erdrich’s hallmark dialogic literary style and practice encompasses writing a series of books; re-cycling protagonists, narrators, events, themes and settings; re-writing previously published novels; employing heteroglossia and polyglossia; co-authoring texts, blogging about books; translating different epistemologies for different audiences; and spotlighting families as the main thematic concern in dialogue with her own parenting experiences as depict...
The Subversive Storyteller: The Short Story Cycle and the Politics of Identity in America examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century American authors adapted and expanded the short story cycle to convey subversive or controversial ideas without alienating readers and threatening their ability to succeed within the literary marketplace. The twelve authors highlighted here come from a wide range of cultural, racial, and geographic backgrounds. Their texts represent different, more advanced stages in the development of the short story cycle as each exploits the fragmentation and inherent lack of cohesion of the genre to reflect the changing realities of life in America during key moments in...
This challenging new book looks at the current reinvention of American Studies: a reinvention that, among other things, has put the whole issue of just what is ‘American’ and what is ‘American Studies’ into contention. The collection focuses, in particular, on American mythology. The editors themselves have written essays that examine the connections between mythologies of the United States and those of either classical European or Native American traditions. William Blazek considers Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine novels as chronicles combining Ojibwa mythology and contemporary U.S. culture in ways that reinvest a sense of mythic identity within a multicultural, postmodern America....
The New Romanticism is an overview of the romantic trend taken up by American novelists in the twentieth-century. Includes three classic essays by Saul bellow, Thomas Pyncheon, and Toni Morrison.
Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as...
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.
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.
This book brings John Gardner’s bestselling Grendel to life in the most comprehensive study of the novel to date. Using as a guide Gardner’s discussions on art, his extensive scholarship on Anglo-Saxon poetry, and his love of stories, this chapter-by-chapter analysis shows Grendel to be much more than an ironic twist on Beowulf. It reveals three distinct fights that mirror the poem, which solves mysteries that have stymied readers for decades. Anyone studying or teaching the novel will find useful analyses of Beowulf, a discussion of the novel within Gardner’s views on morality and art, and an assessment of Grendel as a modern tragic hero and anti-hero. The monster wants to be human with every ounce of his being, even at his death. This issue of identity, particularly for those who are outcast from society, culture, and community, finds resonance in nearly all of Gardner’s works. It does so in Grendel as well, and importantly so, as this work reveals.