Louise Erdrich has shaped the possibilities for Native American, women's and popular fiction in the United States during the late twentieth century. Louise Erdrich collects new essays by noted scholars of Native American Literature on three important novels that chart the trajectory of Erdrich's novelistic career, Tracks (1988), The Last Report on the Miracles At Little No Horse (2001) and The Plague of Doves (2007). The book illuminates Erdrich's multiperspectival representation of Native American culture and history. Focusing on such topics as humor, religion, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, trauma, history, and narrative form, the essays collected here offer fresh readings of Erdrich's explorations of Native American identities through her innovative fictions.

This collection of original essays brings together contributors from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss the implications of the new media for the creation, delivery and assessment of English studies. Strategies by which digital technologies can serve professional, scholarly and pedagogical needs in a completely new way are explored in the context of the role and mission of humanities in the electronic age, student learning from a distance, teaching e-lit, electronic tutorials and interdisciplinarity and collaboration in a virtual environment. Including a useful Glossary of Terms and lists of Further Reading and Key Individuals in the field, this will be an essential volume for all teachers of English Studies.

The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature engages the multiple scenes of tension — historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic — that constitutes a problematic legacy in terms of community identity, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, language, and sovereignty in the study of Native American literature. This important and timely addition to the field provides context for issues that enter into Native American literary texts through allusions, references, and language use. The volume presents over forty essays by leading and emerging international scholars and analyses: regional, cultural, racial and sexual identities in Native American literature key historical moments from the earliest period of colonial contact to the present worldviews in relation to issues such as health, spirituality, animals, and physical environments traditions of cultural creation that are key to understanding the styles, allusions, and language of Native American Literature the impact of differing literary forms of Native American literature. This collection provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It supports academic study and also assists general readers who require a comprehensive yet manageable introduction to the contexts essential to approaching Native American Literature. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of this literary culture. Contributors: Joseph Bauerkemper, Susan Bernardin, Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, Kirby Brown, David J. Carlson, Cari M. Carpenter, Eric Cheyfitz, Tova Cooper, Alicia Cox, Birgit Däwes, Janet Fiskio, Earl E. Fitz, John Gamber, Kathryn N. Gray, Sarah Henzi, Susannah Hopson, Hsinya Huang, Brian K. Hudson, Bruce E. Johansen, Judit Ágnes Kádár, Amelia V. Katanski, Susan Kollin, Chris LaLonde, A. Robert Lee, Iping Liang, Drew Lopenzina, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Deborah Madsen, Diveena Seshetta Marcus, Sabine N. Meyer, Carol Miller, David L. Moore, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Mark Rifkin, Kenneth M. Roemer, Oliver Scheiding, Lee Schweninger, Stephanie A. Sellers, Kathryn W. Shanley, Leah Sneider, David Stirrup, Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., Tammy Wahpeconiah

The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature engages the multiple scenes of tension - historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic - that constitutes a problematic legacy in terms of community identity, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, language, and sovereignty in the study of Native American literature. This important and timely addition to the field provides context for issues that enter into Native American literary texts through allusions, references, and language use. The volume presents over forty essays by leading and emerging international scholars and analyses: regional, cultural, racial and sexual identities in Native American literature key historical moments from the earliest period of colonial contact to the present worldviews in relation to issues such as health, spirituality, animals, and physical environments traditions of cultural creation that are key to understanding the styles, allusions, and language of Native American Literature the impact of differing literary forms of Native American literature. This collection provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It supports academic study and also assists general readers who require a comprehensive yet manageable introduction to the contexts essential to approaching Native American Literature. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of this literary culture. Contributors: Joseph Bauerkemper, Susan Bernardin, Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez, Kirby Brown, David J. Carlson, Cari M. Carpenter, Eric Cheyfitz, Tova Cooper, Alicia Cox, Birgit Dawes, Janet Fiskio, Earl E. Fitz, John Gamber, Kathryn N. Gray, Sarah Henzi, Susannah Hopson, Hsinya Huang, Brian K. Hudson, Bruce E. Johansen, Judit Agnes Kadar, Amelia V. Katanski, Susan Kollin, Chris LaLonde, A. Robert Lee, Iping Liang, Drew Lopenzina, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Deborah Madsen, Diveena Seshetta Marcus, Sabine N. Meyer, Carol Miller, David L. Moore, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Mark Rifkin, Kenneth M. Roemer, Oliver Scheiding, Lee Schweninger, Stephanie A. Sellers, Kathryn W. Shanley, Leah Sneider, David Stirrup, Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., Tammy Wahpeconiah

This collection of original essays brings together contributors from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss the implications of the new media for the creation, delivery and assessment of English studies. Strategies by which digital technologies can serve professional, scholarly and pedagogical needs in a completely new way are explored in the context of the role and mission of humanities in the electronic age, student learning from a distance, teaching e-lit, electronic tutorials and interdisciplinarity and collaboration in a virtual environment. Including a useful Glossary of Terms and lists of Further Reading and Key Individuals in the field, this will be an essential volume for all teachers of English Studies.

The first book devoted exclusively to the poetry and literary aesthetics of one of Native America's most accomplished writers, this collection of essays brings together detailed critical analyses of single texts and individual poetry collections from diverse theoretical perspectives, along with comparative discussions of Vizenor's related works. Contributors discuss Vizenor's philosophy of poetic expression, his innovations in diverse poetic genres, and the dynamic interrelationships between Vizenor's poetry and his prose writings.

Throughout his poetic career Vizenor has returned to common tropes, themes, and structures. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish clearly his work in poetry from his prose, fiction, and drama. The essays gathered in this collection offer powerful evidence of the continuing influence of Anishinaabe dream songs and the haiku form in Vizenor's novels, stories, and theoretical essays; this influence is most obvious at the level of grammatical structure and imagistic composition but can also be discerned in terms of themes and issues to which Vizenor continues to return.

Leading scholars critically explore three leading novels by Louise Erdrich, one of the most important and popular Native American writers working today. Louise Erdrich has shaped the possibilities for Native American, women's and popular fiction in the United States during the late twentieth century. Louise Erdrich collects new essays by noted scholars of Native American Literature on three important novels that chart the trajectory of Erdrich's novelistic career, "Tracks (1988)," "The Last Report on the Miracles At Little No Horse (2001)" and "The Plague of Doves (2007)". This book illuminates Erdrich's multiperspectival representation of Native American culture and history. Focusing on such topics as humor, religion, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, trauma, history, and narrative form, the essays collected here offer fresh readings of Erdrich's explorations of Native American identities through her innovative fictions. This series offers up-to-date guides to the recent work of major contemporary North American authors. Written by leading scholars in the field, each book presents a range of original interpretations of three key texts published since 1990, showing how the same novel may be interpreted in a number of different ways. These informative, accessible volumes will appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, facilitating discussion and supporting close analysis of the most important contemporary American and Canadian fiction.

This text offers an exploration of women's writing that focuses on the close links between literary texts and the theories that construct those texts as "women's writing". Each chapter deals with one of the issues or concepts that have engaged both authors and theorists -rhetoric, work, consciousness, nature, class and race. A detailed analysis shows how each concept has been used by feminists to construct a specific text in such a way that it is received as a work of "women's writing", particularly in American literature. Using canonical texts, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman through Kate Chopin and Willa Cather to Alice Walker and Ann Beattie, the book engages with the major debates within feminist studies. Moving on from Showalte's groundbreaking work to broaden the trajectory of feminist concern, it is an accessible account of the varieties of feminist thought within the context of the key American texts.

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.

Exceptionalism, the notion that Americans have a distinct and special destiny different from that of other nations, permeates every period of American history. It is the single most powerful force in forming the American identity.

In "American Exceptionalism" Deborah L. Madsen traces this powerful theory from its origins in Puritan and Revolutionary-era writing to its latest manifestations in the Vietnam conflict and in current films and fiction.

The growth of the idea is complex. In the 1600s the Massachusetts Bay colonists believed that God had intervened to create in America a "redeemer nation," as is shown in the writings of Mary Rowlandson, William Bradford, and John Cotton. From the perspective of works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville comes the nineteenth-century vision of expansion and dispossession of Native Americans. Later, antislavery writers wielded the rhetoric of exceptionalism against "the peculiar institution." Recent history of American exceptionalism is revealed in the culture of movie Westerns and revisions of the American myth as shown by the novels of Larry McMurtry, Toni Morrison, and Thomas Pynchon.

Alongside each chapter on American perspectives, Madsen places the counterweight of views from Native Americans, Chicanos, and non-Americans. The result is a balanced and thorough sounding of the New World superpower's legacy to the Old World.

"One has a good sense, from this book," says Miles Orvell, "that exceptionalism is not to be dismissed or condemned out of hand (as some are wont to do these days) but must be understood in all its complexity, as a source of America's distinct cultural shape, for better or worse. Madsen succeeds in bringing an intelligent detachment and broadly-informed perspective to an issue that is fraught with passion on all sides."

Deborah L. Madsen is a professor of English at South Bank University in London.

A survey of current critical perspectives on how North American indigenous peoples are viewed and represented transnationally.