Beat literature? Have not the great canonical names long grown familiar? Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs. Likewise the frontline texts, still controversial in some quarters, assume their place in modern American literary history. On the Road serves as Homeric journey epic. "Howl" amounts to Beat anthem, confessional outcry against materialism and war. Naked Lunch, with its dark satiric laughter, envisions a dystopian world of power and word virus. But if these are all essentially America-centered, Beat has also had quite other literary exhalations and which invite far more than mere reception study. These are voices from across the Americas of Canada and Mexico, the Anglophone world of England, Scotland or Australia, the Europe of France or Italy and from the Mediterranean of Greece and the Maghreb, and from Scandinavia and Russia, together with the Asia of Japan and China. This anthology of essays maps relevant other kinds of Beat voice, names, texts. The scope is hemispheric, Atlantic and Pacific, West and East. It gives recognition to the Beat inscribed in languages other than English and reflective of different cultural histories. Likewise the majority of contributors come from origins or affiliations beyond the US, whether in a different English or languages spanning Spanish, Danish, Turkish, Greek, or Chinese. The aim is to recognize an enlarged Beat literary map, its creative internationalism.

In this deliciously delightful and amusing new work, world-traveller, writer A. Robert Lee masters a surprising form: the weird-essay-vignette. In a series of random, yet suspiciously linked, encyclopaedia-like entries, he revisits the bizarre, the banal, and the absurd behaviours, events, and trivia that fuse to create a life - from sexing ostriches, to giant fake teeth, to the meaning of meaning. For readers who love informative comedy, or armchair philosophers who find flipping through dictionaries a serendipitous hoot, this will be a book never to forget, and always to return to.

The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. In this new study, A. Robert Lee aims to explore those counter-seams of modern American writing that sit outside, or at least awkwardly within, agreed literary canons. Specifically, Lee analyses three recent literary branches in the tradition: a re-envisioning of the whole Beat web or circuit; a consortium of postwar "outrider" voices Hunter Thompson to Joan Didion to Kathy Acker; and a latest purview of what, all too casually, has been designated "ethnic" writing.

The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. In this new study, A. Robert Lee aims to explore those counter-seams of modern American writing that sit outside, or at least awkwardly within, agreed literary canons. Specifically, Lee analyses three recent literary branches in the tradition: a re-envisioning of the whole Beat web or circuit; a consortium of postwar "outrider" voices - Hunter Thompson to Joan Didion to Kathy Acker; and a latest purview of what, all too casually, has been designated "ethnic" writing.

The outpouring of Native American literature that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning "House Made of Dawn" in 1968 continues unabated. Fiction and poetry, autobiography and discursive writing from such writers as James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko constitute what critic Kenneth Lincoln in 1983 termed the Native American Renaissance. This collection of essays takes the measure of that efflorescence.
The contributors scrutinize writers from Momaday to Sherman Alexie, analyzing works by Native women, First Nations Canadian writers, postmodernists, and such theorists as Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack. Weaver's own examination of the development of Native literary criticism since 1968 focuses on Native American literary nationalism. Alan R. Velie turns to the achievement of Momaday to examine the ways Native novelists have influenced one another. Post-renaissance and postmodern writers are discussed in company with newer writers such as Gordon Henry, Jr., and D. L. Birchfield. Critical essays discuss the poetry of Simon Ortiz, Kimberly Blaeser, Diane Glancy, Luci Tapahonso, and Ray A. Young Bear, as well as the life writings of Janet Campbell Hale, Carter Revard, and Jim Barnes. An essay on Native drama examines the work of Hanay Geiogamah, the Native American Theater Ensemble, and Spider Woman Theatre.
In the volume's concluding essay, Kenneth Lincoln reflects on the history of the Native American Renaissance up to and beyond his seminal work, and discusses Native literature's legacy and future. The essays collected here underscore the vitality of Native American literature and the need for debate on theory and ideology.

Beat literature? Have not the great canonical names long grown familiar? Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs. Likewise the frontline texts, still controversial in some quarters, assume their place in modern American literary history. On the Road serves as Homeric journey epic. "Howl" amounts to Beat anthem, confessional outcry against materialism and war. Naked Lunch, with its dark satiric laughter, envisions a dystopian world of power and word virus. But if these are all essentially America-centered, Beat has also had quite other literary exhalations and which invite far more than mere reception study. These are voices from across the Americas of Canada and Mexico, the Anglophone world of England, Scotland or Australia, the Europe of France or Italy and from the Mediterranean of Greece and the Maghreb, and from Scandinavia and Russia, together with the Asia of Japan and China. This anthology of essays maps relevant other kinds of Beat voice, names, texts. The scope is hemispheric, Atlantic and Pacific, West and East. It gives recognition to the Beat inscribed in languages other than English and reflective of different cultural histories. Likewise the majority of contributors come from origins or affiliations beyond the US, whether in a different English or languages spanning Spanish, Danish, Turkish, Greek, or Chinese. The aim is to recognize an enlarged Beat literary map, its creative internationalism.

A unique take on modern life in Japan's capital city. A Japan of trains, every day to and fro, carriage scenes and theatre, vistas from the window, advertising posters. Each to be savoured through a specific Tokyo line - the Odakyu. Pitched as creative text and line-graphics, Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line offers on-track and off-track observations. A gallery of mirrors, musings, memories. This is less documentary than iconography, a poetics of Japanese routine and etiquette. It offers a wry diary of month-and-weekday observations, a 'map' of Shinjuku as key station and gathering-place, a run of notable Tokyo locations - from the National bunraku theatre to a Kawasaki sludge recycling centre. Other Odakyu travel involves the Hakone open air art gallery, Narita as both airport and temple complex, Yokohama as history and Chinatown. Essential reading for first-time, and second-time visitors, and even regular commuters.

Explores the counter-cultural movement known as the Beat Generation Gives a detailed overview of the movement both in the US and internationally Includes chapters on significant women writers such as Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger and Anne Waldman Covers readings from John Clellon Holmes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso to Herbert Huncke, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder Focuses on African American writers like LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman This book pairs close readings with a strong overview of the movement and ranges from Women's Beat Writing to African American Beats to the canonical texts, including 'Howl', On the Road and Naked Lunch. A closing chapter maps post-Beat writing and the ways Beat has morphed into new, even postmodern, forms.

Postindian Conversations is the first collection of in-depth interviews with Gerald Vizenor, one of the most powerful and provocative voices in the Native world today. These lively conversations with the preeminent novelist and cultural critic reveal much about the man, his literary creations, and his critical perspectives on important issues affecting Native peoples at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The book also casts new light on his sometimes controversial ideas about contemporary Native identity, politics, economics, scholarship, and literature. Gerald Vizenor is a professor of American Studies and Native American literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the American Book Award-winner Griever: An American Monkey King in China. A. Robert Lee is a professor of American literature at Nihon University in Tokyo. His books include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America. His edited works include Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader.

Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy explores the wide-ranging oeuvre of this seminal author, examining Owens's work and his importance in literature and Native studies. Of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish American descent, Owens's work includes mysteries, novels, literary scholarship, and autobiographical essays. Louis Owens offers a critical introduction and thirteen essays arranged into three sections: "Owens and the World," "Owens and California," and "The Novels." The essays present an excellent assessment of Owens's literary legacy, noting his contributions to American literature, ethnic literature, and Native American literature and highlighting his contributions to a variety of theories and genres. The collection concludes with a coda of personal poetic reflections on Owens by Diane Glancy and Kimberly Blaeser. Libraries, students, scholars, and the general public interested in Native American literature and the landscape of contemporary US literature will welcome this reflective volume that analyzes a vast range of Louis Owens's imaginative fictions, personal accounts, and critical work.

Explores the counter-cultural movement known as the Beat Generation Gives a detailed overview of the movement both in the US and internationally Includes chapters on significant women writers such as Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger and Anne Waldman Covers readings from John Clellon Holmes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso to Herbert Huncke, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder Focuses on African American writers like LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman This book pairs close readings with a strong overview of the movement and ranges from Women's Beat Writing to African American Beats to the canonical texts, including 'Howl', On the Road and Naked Lunch. A closing chapter maps post-Beat writing and the ways Beat has morphed into new, even postmodern, forms.

Novelist, autobiographer, poet, dramatist, essayist, and cultural critic of rare and radical boldness, Gerald Vizenor has long stood at the very forefront of Native writing. His challenges to received thinking, along with signature phrases like postindian, survivance, storier, double-other, and terminal creed, have uniquely influenced the discourse of Native life and art. This essay collection offers an overview of Vizenor scholarship through close reading of his texts and exploration of the intellectual contexts in which they are situated. Vizenor's achievements cannot be easily summarized; rather, this book gives due evidence of the complexity of his work and the diverse critical responses to it. The book comprises close textual readings of Vizenor's writing as well as comparative readings that place Vizenor's achievement in various theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts as well as the context of fellow Native writers. The final section makes available the full text of the ratified Constitution of the White Earth Nation of which Vizenor was the lead writer, an essay by Vizenor about the significance and provenance of the Constitution, and a new interview by A. Robert Lee, bringing the collection to Vizenor's most recent writing and his thoughts about his future projects.

Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse Although there are any number of single-volume anthologies on individual writers and movements (e.g. the Harlem Renaissance), African American Writing is the first multi-volume collection to provide users with full coverage of a crucial literary tradition, a tradition that now spans slave texts to novels by Nobel Prize-winning authors, and which is, in the learned editor's words, 'intrinsic to America's self-articulation'. As serious scholarly work on and around the literary output of African Americans flourishes as never before, this new five-volume collection, co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to help users navigate and make sense of the subject's vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. African American Writing is edited by A. Robert Lee, formerly Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan. His expert selection brings together the best and most influential critical assessments, evaluations, and other scholarship in one easy-to-use 'mini library'. The set includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, as well as detailed bibliographies and timelines. It is destined to be valued by researchers and students as an essential work of reference. The editor of this collection, A. Robert Lee, is a leading expert in the field. His Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003) won the American Book Award in 2001. His recent work includes Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (Routledge, 2010) and a four-volume collection on Native American Writing (Routledge and Edition Synapse, 2011).

IMAGINARIUM: SIGHTINGS, GALLERIES, SIGHTLINES, A. Robert Lee's latest collection of poetry, turns on two connecting keynotes: imagination and sight. Across a broad canvas each of its sequences explores the ways we go about imagining as much as seeing reality. Sightings, which opens the book, turns upon a dozen or so celebrated paintings, among them J.M.W. Turner and Frida Kahlo. Galleries extends the usual meaning of the term to include vantage-points like a French archeological cave, a Bosphorus Straits crossing and a Tokyo station. Sightlines frames a run of personal encounters within the heights and widths of buildings and landscapes -- whether different Metro stations, or a major Japanese waterfall or Memphis's Beale Street. IMAGINARIUM explores yet other kinds of seeing, including poems that use bird flight as metaphors of imagination, airplane travel and its larger meanings of self-journey, science fiction film and the envisioning of other worlds, a roster of US photography, and imagination itself as a process to be imagined. In sum the reader is invited into a two-way exchange, imagination as seeing, seeing as imagination.

AMERICAN LITERATURE ] LITERARY CRITICISM

In the United States, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ralph Ellison, N. Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jessica Hagedorn are among the notable writers of color who have emerged since World War II. Although definitely individual and widely diverse, they are all-American in their collective mixture of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic strains. The work of each, although distinct, has not remained in cultural isolation but has enriched the inclusive literary treasury of the United States.

This comprehensive, timely study by a British scholar closely examines their fiction and autobiographical writings in cultural perspective. It analyzes the ways politics and popular tradition have influenced their work and the ways these ethnic authors address and question such matters as whiteness, autobiography, geography, and the forms of prose.

Other books have explored the variety of ethnic traditions in American literature, but this is the first to consider them in comparative terms in a single volume. In focusing on these writers and their place in the context of American history and contemporary popular culture, "Multicultural American Literature" underlines the reality that it is multicultural writing that has revolutionized recent American literary history.

For those wishing clear and accurate perspective on the national literature of the present day, this informative book analyzes the spectrum and provides an exact and faithful view of its multicultural character.

A. Robert Lee, a professor of American literature at Nihon University in Tokyo, is the author of "Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America" and, with Gerald Vizenor, "Postindian Conversations.""

Including the Chicano southwest of California, Texas, Arizona, Colarado, New Mexico, and Nevada, together with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and its Manhattan offshoot, Spanish Harlem, the Cuban America of Florida, as well as the many smaller communities whose origins lie in Central and South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Hispanic and Latino Americans are now the largest ethnic minority in the United States. Indeed, the USA is now the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. As serious scholarly work on and around the literary output of Hispanic and Latino Americans flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection, co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to help users navigate and make sense of the subject's vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. US Latino/a Writing is edited by A. Robert Lee, former Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan. His expert selection brings together the best and most influential critical assessments, evaluations, and other scholarship in one easy-to-use 'mini library'. It also includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, as well as detailed bibliographies and timelines. It is destined to be valued by researchers and students as an essential work of reference. ----- The editor of this collection, A. Robert Lee, is a leading expert in the field. He is Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo. His Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003) won the American Book Award in 2001. His recent work includes Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (Routledge, 2010) and a four-volume collection on Native American Writing (Routledge and Edition Synapse, 2011).

Can it now be doubted that Native American/First Nations literary voice has become other than an established, and hugely compelling, compass? Native North American Authorship takes bearings, a roster of close readings yet situated within the wider latitudes and longitudes of timeline, place, memory. The emphasis falls throughout upon imagination, the "breath" within given texts be they fiction, poetry or self-writing. This is also to emphasize Native writing as modern (and in some cases postmodern) phenomenon, for sure rooted in tribal particularity, oral tradition, and trickster lore, but also given to reflexivity, the writer looking over his/her own shoulder. The authorship involved is now a literature equally of the city and indeed of geographies encountered beyond North America. The aim is to avoid suggesting some Grand Synthesis or to replay battles of reservation/off reservation ideology. The account opens with two purviews: the scale of Native written texts from early Christian-convert witness to contemporary verse and story by names like Tommy Pico and Eden Robinson, and the fuller implication of a category like Native American Renaissance. Key author portraits follow of N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie and Louis Owens. New longer fiction and anthology stories invite their respective chapters as do the story-collections of Diane Glancy and Stephen Graham Jones. Poetry assumes focus in the accounts of Joy Harjo and her contemporaries and Simon Ortiz and his contemporaries, with specific chapters on Jim Barnes, Linda Hogan and Ralph Salisbury. The epilogue adds further context: "Native" as cultural etymology, the role of site and space-time, and the affinities of Native authorship with other Native arts.

Across more than two centuries Afro-America has created a huge and dazzling variety of literary self-expression. Designs of Blackness provides less a narrative literary history than, precisely, a series of mappings-each literary-critical and comparative while at the same time offering cultural and historical context. This carefully re-edited version of the 1998 publication opens with an estimation of earliest African American voice in the names of Phillis Wheatley and her contemporaries. It then takes up the huge span of autobiography from Frederick Douglass through to Maya Angelou. "Harlem on My Mind," which follows, sets out the literary contours of America's premier black city. Womanism, Alice Walker's presiding term, is given full due in an analysis of fiction from Harriet E. Wilson to Toni Morrison. Richard Wright is approached not as some regulation "realist" but as a more inward, at times near-surreal, author. Decadology has its risks but the 1940s has rarely been approached as a unique era of war and peace and especially in African American texts. Beat Generation work usually adheres to Ginsberg and Kerouac, but black Beat writing invites its own chapter in the names of Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman. The 1960s has long become a mythic change-decade, and in few greater respects than as a black theatre both of the stage and politics. In Leon Forrest African America had a figure of the postmodern turn: his work is explored in its own right and for how it takes its place in the context of other reflexive black fiction. "African American Fictions of Passing" unpacks the whole deceptive trope of "race" in writing from Williams Wells Brown through to Charles Johnson. The two newly added chapters pursue African American literary achievement into the Obama-Trump century, fiction from Octavia Butler to Darryl Pinkney, poetry from Rita Dove to Kevin Young.

Diane Glancy is one of the outstanding Native American authors of modern times. Working in multiple genres - poetry, novel, theatre and nonfiction - she has created a vast, ceaselessly provocative oeuvre (more than 35 volumes) and an instantly recognizable voice. Her subject matter is astonishingly diverse, encompassing everything from the Cherokee Trail of Tears to the New Testament character of Dorcas, from the lives of small-town Midwestern women to the joys of classic automobiles, from grade school maskmaking to the recuperation of personal heritage in the archives.The essays in this groundbreaking volume represent the first attempt to systematically survey this challenging writer. Ten outstanding scholars approach her work, mapping out controversies and providing readers of Glancy with various contexts and comparisons through which to understand her ideas. These chapters take a variety of ideological and methodological positions (feminist, Christian, postcolonial, literary-nationalist and more), the better to draw out the complexities of a writer whose work never lets the reader come to easy conclusions. Also included are an original interview with Glancy herself, a survey of previous criticism and a bibliography of her writings. This volume will therefore serve equally well as an introduction to Glancy for newcomers and as an in-depth survey for people already familiar with her work.The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy is part of a unique series of companion volumes to Native American poets. Previous subjects include Carter Revard and Jim Barnes.