The Demon of the Continent Indians and the Shaping of American
Literature Joshua David Bellin "This work will join such studies as
Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark," Eric Sundquist's "To Wake
the Nations," and Lucy Maddox's "Removals." It is a thoughtful,
engaging study."--Priscilla Wald, Duke University "Bellin not only
proposes a major and fundamentally new reading of American
literature itself, he also writes beautifully."--Barry F.
O'Connell, Amherst College In recent years, the study and teaching
of Native American oral and written art have flourished. During the
same period, there has been a growing recognition among historians,
anthropologists, and ethnohistorians that Indians must be seen not
as the voiceless, nameless, faceless Other but as people who had a
powerful impact on the historical development of the United States.
Literary critics, however, have continued to overlook Indians as
determinants of American--rather than specifically Native
American--literature. The notion that the presence of Indian
peoples shaped American literature as a whole remains unexplored.
In "The Demon of the Continent," Joshua David Bellin probes the
complex interrelationships among Native American and Euro-American
cultures and literatures from the mid-seventeenth to the
mid-nineteenth centuries. He asserts that cultural contact is at
the heart of American literature. For Bellin, previous studies of
Indians in American literature have focused largely on the images
Euro-American writers constructed of indigenous peoples, and have
thereby only perpetuated those images. Unlike authors of those
earlier studies, Bellin refuses to reduce Indians to static
antagonists or fodder for a Euro-American imagination. Drawing on
works such as Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," William Apess' "A Son
of the Forest," and little known works such as colonial Indian
conversion narratives, he explores the ways in which these texts
reflect and shape the intercultural world from which they arose. In
doing so, Bellin reaches surprising conclusions: that "Walden"
addresses economic clashes and partnerships between Indians and
whites; that William Bartram's "Travels" encodes competing and
interpenetrating systems of Indian and white landholding; that
Catherine Sedgwick's "Hope Leslie" enacts the antebellum drama of
Indian conversion; that James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow struggled with Indian authors such as George Copway and
David Cusick for physical, ideological, and literary control of the
nation. "The Demon of the Continent" proves Indians to be actors in
the dynamic processes in which America and its literature are
inescapably embedded. Shifting the focus from textual images to the
sites of material, ideological, linguistic, and aesthetic
interaction between peoples, Bellin reenvisions American literature
as the product of contact, conflict, accommodation, and
interchange. Joshua David Bellin is a member of the faculty of La
Roche College. 2000 280 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3570-8 Cloth
$59.95s 39.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-1748-3 Paper $27.50s 18.00 World
Rights Literature, Native American Studies, Cultural Studies Short
copy: American literature has been deeply shaped by the presence of
American Indians.
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