Native American Literature Research Articles

ENGLISH LETTERS AND INDIAN LITERACIES: READING, WRITING, AND NEW ENGLAND MISSIONARY SCHOOLS, 1750–1830

ENGLISH LETTERS AND INDIAN LITERACIES: READING, WRITING, AND NEW ENGLAND MISSIONARY SCHOOLS, 1750-1830. By Hilary E. Wyss. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. xii + 251 pp. $59.95.Hilary Wyss has emerged as a major force in recovery of early Native American writers. For years, standard anthologies, and a good deal of scholarship, acknowledged only two: seventeenth-century Mohegan missionary Samson Occom and nineteenth-century Pequot minister William Apess. This limiting (abetted by Heath and Norton anthologies' annoying persistence in relegating Native American oral traditions to their pre-literate, pre-1700 sections) helps perpetuate racist myths: that Native Americans vanished; that they had relatively little to contribute to American literature; and that, when they did write, they did so only as tools of colonial order.Alphabetic literacy is certainly a technology of colonial domination, but Wyss's first book, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity and Native Community in Early America (2000), argued that indigenous textual production between and preceding Occom and Apess is much more complicated and much more voluminous, if only we are willing to read archives more deeply. Bearing out her claim, last decade and a half have produced a cascade of new work on early Native authors: Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks's widely cited study, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in Northeast (2008), and Drew Lopenzina's Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up Pen in Colonial Period (2012), as well as brilliant documentary anthology that Wyss coedited with Kristina Bross, Early Native Literacies in New England (2008), and Robert Dale Parker's Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Poetry to 1930 (2010). These volumes, and many more, have assiduously illustrated that Native Americans who embraced alphabetic literacy-and even those who had it thrust upon them-exercised their own agency in writing and articulated complex ideals of self-determination and tribal sovereignty.You cannot understand early Native American literature without understanding early education. As Wyss puts it,Indian education is nexus through which social, political, and cultural differences were played out among Native groups, between colonial and indigenous peoples, and between competing colonial figures invested in idea of Native literacy. . . . And under often intensely difficult conditions Native Americans sustained themselves as people with their own history and culture while accepting material artifacts of English life. (35-36)English Letters and Literacies continues to fill in this history with a sustained examination of Congregationalist boarding schools operating within and outside of New England between two Great Awakenings. Evangelical efforts to educate Indians, and thereby to convert them, began almost as soon as Puritans arrived. These projects ranged from John Eliot's famous praying towns to more diffuse, home- and communitybased reading instruction. In mid-eighteenth century, New England authorities began pinning their hopes on boarding schools-precursors to infamous Carlisle School of later nineteenth century, which removed Native children from their home communities in interests of speedier assimilation. Most of these early experiments were short-lived: [N]one of them were able to sustain good relations for more than a few years with various tribes they claimed to serve . . . [revealing] gap between what Natives wanted from such ventures and what missionaries expected of their students (18). Yet schools also left extensive archives, documents that have much to tell us about colonial ideals of literacy and about Native uses of writing.Wyss characterizes former ideal as the Readerly Indian (one imagined as a passive recipient of European missionary message) and latter as the Writerly Indian, a construct that aims, strategically and purposefully, to recover agency of Indians who picked up pen. …

Naturalism's Dietary Discourse

This paper examines the literature of Upton Sinclair, famed American author of The Jungle, and how this 1906 novel led to the formation of Theodore Roosevelt's Food and Drug Administration. I am particularly interested in Sinclair's fascination with fasting fads, which reflect a larger Progressive-era preoccupation with physical fitness and the white male body. American literary naturalism, the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century movement to which Sinclair contributes, is a literature of and about human hunger. Many scholars have focused on The Jungle, a seminal book that revolutionized the food industry; however, little work has been done on the narratives about fasting and fitness that followed. My work therefore draws attention to a dietary discourse that reveals a great deal about early twentieth-century conceptions of masculinity, health, and the body. This paper is part of a larger effort to reconcile a counter-narrative of culturally disordered eating and self-restraint on the one hand with the ecological ethics so central to naturalism's politically radical sentiments on the other.

Reading Native American Literature by Joseph L. Coulombe (review)

Reading Native American Literature by Joseph L. Coulombe (review)

Excerpt from <i>Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature</i>

Author(s): Piatote, Beth H. | Abstract: Excerpted from Beth H. Piatote, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).Reprinted with permission from Yale University Press.

Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature ed. by Qwo-Li Driskill, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti (review)

Reviewed by: Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature ed. by Qwo-Li Driskill, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti Andrew Uzendoski Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. Edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011. 223 pages, $26.95. Heteropatriarchy, imposing a totalizing measure of modern sexuality, is the baseline for settler-colonial society. Therefore, powerful stories of indigenous sovereignty, Two-Spirit conceptions of gender, sexuality, and community have consistently been targeted throughout the expansion of settler-colonialism. Nevertheless, Two-Spirit artists and activists persist in contemporary Native America: they continue to practice and represent tribal-specific gender constructions and social systems. A recent surge in both artistic production by queer Native people and critical scholarship dedicated to Two-Spirit issues was the impetus for the editors to assemble Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. Defined by the editors as an “assertion of the decolonial potential of Native two-spirit/queer people healing from heteropatriarchal gender regimes,” a theory of Sovereign Erotics recognizes the myriad ways that colonial power has tethered settler colonialism to non-Native modern sexualities—and that a queer Native/Two-Spirit critique can offer crucial insight and support for decolonization projects (3). Sovereign Erotics is a valuable tool for scholars and educators interested in exploring the tribal-specific concerns of queer Native writers as well as the intersections between Native American and Euroamerican literatures. Exploring the crossroads of imperialism and sexuality, Maurice Kenny reveals how a copy of Tarzan, a literary relic of colonial exoticism given to him as a present during his childhood, once gave contours to his then nascent personal expression of sexual desire: “I have it still, / re-read it a year ago, / remembered / how important / it was to my dreams” (77). Guided by the belief that the erotic structures the social in crucial ways, this collection juxtaposes private scenes of intimacy (“Clementines” by Deborah Miranda) with narratives set in public spaces such as a school playground (“Kid” by Carrie House) and a Halloween party at a New Orleans bar (“Ghost Dance” by Chip Livingston). The four sections—“Dream/Ancestors,” “Love/Medicine,” “Long/Walks,” and “Wild/Flowers”—organize Sovereign Erotics thematically. The first section serves as a bridge between older generations and [End Page 353] young Two-Spirit writers. Originally written in 1981, Paula Gunn Allen’s “Some Like Indians Endure” sets the framework for the collection’s intergenerational dialogue. She searches outside of heteronormative temporalities for anticolonial histories as well as commonalities with non-Native communities. Her prospective opening statement—“I have it in my mind that / dykes are indians”—materializes into a conceptual foundation later in the poem: “Because the only home / is each other / they’ve occupied all / the rest / colonized it: an / idea about ourselves is all / we own” (21). This poem is echoed by the following piece in the collection, Kim Shuck’s “Warrior.” Shuck’s final lines emphasize the collaborative process necessary for this recovery work: “How about this: / Help me pull the bullets from the trees. / Learn my language / I’ll learn your history” (26). The third section’s centerpiece, “Ander’s Awakening,” is Daniel Heath Justice’s prequel to his separately published trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles (2011). This prequel allows us to better value how Justice conceptualizes decolonization by creating a fantasy setting that is radically informed by Two-Spirit legacies. Justice’s piece represents one of the fundamental objectives of Sovereign Erotics: to serve as a critical horizon for young readers trying to imagine better lives in the here and now. Andrew Uzendoski University of Texas at Austin Copyright © 2013 Western Literature Association

On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism

On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism

Multiculturalism and The Canon in American Literature: Why Teach Marmon Silko?

In this paper, the author argues that although multiculturalism calls for the breaking down of certain barriers to usher in cultural miscegenation in education, the place of the “glocal,” that is the function of local agency under the pressure of global forces, remains a predominant issue in Native American literature. The author uses post-colonial theory and analyzes Marmon Silko’s Ceremony to posit that issues of identity and hybridity can be better understood and managed in terms of “glocality.” This accounts for the great necessity of this kind of literature in our academies (citadels where knowledge is dispensed and acquired) given that knowledge acquisition and use has always been a great determinant of individual and universal stability especially in a world which is continually being hollowed out by forces of a universalized culture.

Native American Literature and Its Place in the Inter-American Project

Issues of Native American literature and culture are placed in a comparative and inter-American perspective, where texts from Canada, the United States, Spanish America, and Brazil are discussed and contrasted. Native American texts are analyzed in the context of inter-American literary study, which is defined as an interdisciplinary approach to the literatures of North, Central, and South America. The argument is made that Native American literature represents the cultural and historical foundation of the entire inter-American project.

Louise Erdrich's 20th Century Novels in the Context of Native American Literary and Cultural Traditions (Problems, Symbolism, Main Images)

This thesis is for the Candidate of Philology degree in specialization 10.01.04. – Literature of Foreign Countries. – Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University. – Kyiv, 2010. The dissertation is a first in home literary studies attempt to complexly analyse the 20th century novels of an outstanding Native American writer Louise Erdrich. The basic research goals are the novelist’s work objective evaluation, its problems, symbolism, main images analysis in the context of Indian literary and cultural traditions, determining L. Erdrich’s personal contribution into the multi-cultural US literature. The research methods used by Native, Non-Native and post-Soviet literary critics to interpret the complicated phenomenon of L. Erdrich’s prose are considered in the paper. In addition, the writer’s search of style in the context of Native American and American literatures of the second half of the 20th century is shown in the thesis.As there are no overall techniques to interpret indigenous prose in Ukrainian literary criticism, the study of Louise Erdrich’s fiction with taking into account Indian literary principles is offered in the research. The writer’s work is a product of a great personal creativity influenced by oral tradition and postmodern literature. It also offers a rich canvas of Anishinaabe mythology and world perspective, the same as Catholic religious beliefs. Her prose also offers the following Anishinaabe and pan-Indian cultural insights and ceremonies as pipe ceremony, naming, purification, healing, vision quest, first hunting, traditional marriage, pow-wow, etc. Her exquisite psycho-analytical novels, offering a profound immersion into “female space”, are unique literary accomplishments fictional reality of which has often been confused with magical realism literary reality.Cultural, historical and literary contexts of the novelist’s prose are studied in the dissertation. The impact of Ojibwe folklore images, basic Indian and universal archetypes on L. Erdirch’s work are considered. Moreover, main motifs, plot schemes, semantics of colors, protagonists’ names and numbers used in the writer’s novels are discussed. This helps understand L. Erdrich’s fictional intentions, reflects the influence of important social, cultural and historical peculiarities of a Native person’s integration into a contemporary multi-cultural American society. Her prose is of a strong political influence in which the writer shows the dramatic consequences of social and cultural assimilation of Native peoples. On the examples of her characters’ lives she demonstrates the ruining impact of boarding school system on indigenous children. As a result of Indian “holocaust”, prohibition to speak Anishinaabe language and to practice native beliefs and ceremonies on their land many Ojibwe people became the victims of inferiority complexes and self-hatred. L. Erdrich shows the psychological drama of a contemporary Indian: complete return to the former way of life is as impossible as full acceptance of the new life style imposed by colonizers. The analyses of L. Erdrich’s fictional characters’ names, natural elements, main archetypes and images semantics, color and number symbolism are pioneer attempts in home American literary readings.Trickster-like multiple-voice narration, numerous versions of fictional truth, collective “we” and multiple allusions to Ojibwe myths make L. Erdrich’s novels often built in the form of short interconnected stories unique examples of clustering, which is discussed for the first time in home literary studies. The unique chronotope of Louise Erdrich’s prose is firstly considered in Ukrainian literary criticism. Her fictional chronotope – oneness of spherical space, vector, cyclical and generational time models – is a significant accomplishment not only of modern Indian, but also of American prose.The study of man-land relationship and its breaking after-effects in Erdrich’s prose is a substantial thesis accomplishment. The research expands the former boundaries of “mythical twins” category, offering protagonists’ and antagonists’ images discussion. Double names of novel chapters – in English and in Ojibwe – are considered to be a sign of indigenous languages revitalization. Special attention is given in the research to writer’s interpretation of the pan-Indian plot scheme and motif of road as its inseparable constituent. Detailed description of fictional characters’ initiation offers an alternative vision of urgent issues solution.The writer unites the following: various interpretations of Ojibwe folklore stories told by numerous narrators; storytelling from the perspective of collective “we”; L. Erdrich’s personal stories characteristic for communal narration, a new fictional form in Native literature. This broadens the horizons of Ukrainian literary criticism, enriching it with the knowledge of new types of narratives and compositional structure of a literary piece. The author’s unique style enriches both Native and American literary traditions. Further research in this direction is of critical importance for Ukrainian literary criticism because of the rich variety of important topics, teachings, symbols, literary techniques and genres of L. Erdrich’s sophisticated prose.

Resurgence of Ethnicity and National Identity in Contemporary Native American Literature

The paper offered is devoted to the analysis of Native American identity questions discussed in contemporary Indian fiction. Though the author of the article is Not-Native, an attempt to consider cultural issues from Indian point of view is made. Such novels as “Ceremony,” 1977 by Leslie Silko; “Bingo Palace,” 1994 by Louise Erdrich; “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” 2007 by Sherman Alexie are used as the study material. The problems of self-realization, national dignity regain, inferiority complexes and post-colonial trauma causes are considered. The research proposed draws attention of both Native and Non-Native audiences to the destructive aftereffects of ethnic genocide. It also helps understand indigenous values, priorities and mentality. Misinterpretation of Native objects purposes and disrespect towards Indianness result in cultural misunderstanding and offense which can be regarded as a further endeavor of colonization. These ideas are supported by the relevant examples from the novels selected. The work of indigenous writers is treated as a powerful means of mass influence helping solve current problems of ethnicity and national identity, bridge the existing cultural gaps. Expansion of knowledge on important aspects of Indian nations’ worldview improves cross-cultural understanding and promotes balanced co-existence of Native and Non-Native peoples. It also encourages indigenous people to be aware of their rich spiritual and cultural legacy helping them survive the painful blunders of the past. The following methods are applied in the study: historical, cultural and comparative analyses. The results received may contribute to the recent social decolonization and Native resurgence process.

Joseph L. Coulombe. Reading Native American Literature

Joseph L. Coulombe. Reading Native American Literature

The Ghost Dance and the Politics of Exclusion in Sherman Alexie's “Distances.”

Critical responses to (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene) Sherman Alexie's stories of the Spokane Indian reservation and its (semi-)fictional inhabitants inThe Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven(1993, hereinTLR) tend to polarize over the problem of the collection's cultural authenticity. The majority of these criticisms fall into one of two categories: those who condemn the author's prose for trafficking moribund Indian stereotypes, and those who defend his commitment to realistic portrayals of a struggling reservation community. In either case, it is the perceived capacity of the stories to develop a particular sense of indigenous community that typically functions as the measure of their cultural authenticity. One story fromTLRthat has received none of this critical attention is “Distances,” a contemporary, dystopian realization of Wovoka's late nineteenth-century Ghost Dance prophecy that shares none of the characters, settings or events common to the other stories. This apparent withdrawal from the collection's featured community and “reservation realist” aesthetic affords Alexie the critical distance to examine the exclusionary principles that underlay the formation of American Indian communities, and the value of these principles for the individual members. A close reading of “Distances” reveals Alexie's representations of contemporary Ghost Dances to be crucial interjections into the debates surrounding American Indian literary nationalism, as his writing seeks to dramatize the problems of a separatist agenda for urban Indian communities.

MELANIE BENSON TAYLOR. Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause.

Melanie Benson Taylor explores a significant “family resemblance” between Native American writing and non-Indian culture in the modern U.S. South. Indian literature, she observes, displays a fixation on a Native American “Lost Cause” every bit as powerful as some white southerners' obsession with the Civil War and Reconstruction. For instance, Native writers dwell upon tribal histories of violent conquest and colonization much in the way that neo-Confederates endlessly revisit their ancestors' defeat at the hands of Yankee invaders. Native American literature also often invokes an idyllic tribal past comparable to the mythic image of genteel plantation culture. Both versions of the Lost Cause, moreover, sometimes express opposition to capitalism and a concern for issues of sovereignty and self-determination. Southern white and southern Indian cultures, Taylor suggests, overlap and inform one another to a degree contemporary observers seldom recognize. In pursuing the implications of this insight, Taylor examines the work of a large and quite diverse collection of Native American writers, from established figures like Louis Owens and LeAnne Howe to lesser-known authors such as Dawn Karima Pettigrew. She also draws extensively on the writings of contemporary Native American literary critics like Robert Warrior and Craig Womack. While much of this work attempts to express a distinctly Native outlook, Taylor places it within southern literature, demonstrating the extent to which Native American fiction and poetry perpetuate themes commonly associated with southern writing. She notes a powerful strain of nostalgia, for instance, along with a growing emphasis on retaliatory violence. She describes a southern Indian literature that is as haunted by history as any Faulkner novel. Taylor suggests that these common tendencies reflect a “southern mode of storying” (p. 65) tied to a shared experience of historical trauma and deprivation. She argues, moreover, that Native American writers did not simply appropriate these practices from an existing southern literature. Rather, the commonalities reflect a process of cross-pollination among defeated southern peoples.

"Who We Was"

Through the exploration of Abenaki author Joseph Bruchac's Hidden Roots (2004), a young adult historical novel, the article examines the intersection of racial and disability ideologies in the eugenics movement in 1930s America. It discusses the text in light of critical disability theory, Native American literature, children's literature, and rhetorical analysis, concluding that the novel illustrates the intersection of oppressive ideologies, and by doing so creates more critical readers and the potential for activism. Readers can become witnesses to the testimony of historical trauma, and this has the potential for questioning, reacting to, and reflecting upon readers' relations to these histories as well as today's residual ideologies.

On Reading Anew: Native Communications Systems and Scholarly Literacy

On Reading a New:Native Comunications Systems and Scholarly Literacy Cristobal Silva (bio) The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England by Matt Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Pp. 296. $67.50 cloth, 22.50 paper. The proliferation of digital databases over the past decade has been a windfall for early Americanists who now find themselves with convenient and near instantaneous access to a wide range of printed material from the colonial era. And yet, although this access has doubtless simplified, if not revolutionized, basic research for scholars around the world, it has raised new sets of issues while leaving other, longstanding ones unresolved. New methodological questions raised by the era of digital scholarship include how cataloguing and acquisition strategies, information systems, and searchable text transform our reading practices, and what the impact of these transformed practices is on the production of knowledge—both within the academy and without. Put another way, we might ask how networks of texts, keywords, and genres reshape the geography of archival work. A more long-standing question—one that all scholars and teachers of early colonial America must eventually confront—concerns the status of Native American literatures in a field where digital resources have multiplied the numbers and kinds of texts available for us to read. This question requires us to confront what we mean by literature, what we envision as Native, and how we imagine Native literatures to interact or engage with European literary traditions. Such questions resonate through departmental hallways, at [End Page 527] conferences, in scholarly books, and in the classroom, but as pragmatic as the discussions they produce might be, they can leave one wary of the familiar tropes and figures used to account for Native voices in early narratives. These include mediation, ventriloquism, orality, and literacy. My own uneasiness about these conversations derives from a suspicion that they often only circle around a far more fundamental set of questions that lie at the heart of our work as scholars and teachers, and are exacerbated by the turn to digital media: What do we do when the historical record isn’t legible in the way that we’ve been trained to read? When our own literacy is itself at stake? At its most ambitious, these are the problems that interdisciplinary work attempts to unfold: bringing disparate analytic and reading practices to bear on one another in order to make legible what has not only previously been illegible, but has often, in fact, been invisible. This is the site where Matt Cohen’s The Networked Wilderness operates. By grounding his analysis in a deep understanding of digital and media studies, Cohen points us toward a new era of colonial, Indigenous, and Native American studies, revealing new materials that emerge from familiar sources. In doing so, he asks that we “alter our relationship to those sources” (128). In return, he trains us how to read anew. The Networked Wilderness will appeal to a broad range of scholars in the fields of book history, early American, Indigenous, Native American, and digital/media studies. Cohen’s key insight is to bring these fields into productive conversation and to imagine how their intersection will shape future scholarship for each. More importantly, rather than subordinating Native American and Indigenous studies to these other fields, Cohen demonstrates that close attention to Native communications radically remakes them. As his title suggests, Cohen’s use of the term “Networked” signals a strategy that courts a certain kind of deliberate anachronism rather than avoiding it. But where such anachronism can lead to confusion, internal paradox, and failure if deployed haphazardly, Cohen’s deft approach to transhistorical analysis opens the field in suggestive ways. Indeed, The Networked Wilderness self-consciously bypasses the traditional print/orality binary that has framed so many past approaches to early Native literatures and, in so doing, produces an uncanny insight about the relation between colonial networks and our own digital world. He writes that “as we increasingly interact with and through new multimedia technologies in a polyglot, culturally diverse world, what the American Indians and the English were going through in the [seventeenth-century] northeastern woods may [End Page 528] seem eerily familiar” (2...

Leasing, Law, and Land Tenure: Understanding the Impact of the Long-Term Leasing Act of 1955 on Indian Land Holdings

An increasing focus of contemporary Native American economic development literature concentrates on the role of institutions. Land tenure arrangements are an important part of the institutional structure on reservations because several reservations rely on agriculture and resource extraction. The 1950s and 1960s were characterized by a series of policy interventions targeting Native Americans. One such policy, the Long-Term Leasing Act (LTLA) of 1955, reduced bureaucratic oversight and altered the composition of Native American trust land. The policy extended the possible term of leases on trust lands, increasing economic opportunities, lowering transaction costs, and increasing the discounted present value of retaining land in trust status. Using a new panel dataset on land tenure, this paper finds that the LTLA significantly diminished the flow of land to fee-simple (private ownership) and tribally owned land held in trust, leading to a higher rate of retention in individually owned land held in government trust. I extend the empirical framework to determine whether reservations under state jurisdiction experienced additional changes in land tenure due to the ability to more credibly commit to leasing contracts or whether legal uncertainty over land-use and expanded credit access led to increased transfer to fee-simple. The results suggest that reservations under state jurisdiction continued transferring land to fee-simple, which supports the legal land-use uncertainty and suggests the expanded credit access impacted purchasing more than leasing. To examine the degree that heirship is influencing the results, I estimate the model by allotment date groups, where allotment dates proxy for heirship. Results indicate that reservations allotted earlier, which have more fractionated ownership, responded more to the Long-Term Leasing Act. Shifts in land holdings induced by the LTLA reinforce the importance of reducing transaction costs associated with trust land for Native American economic development.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism ed. by Keith Newlin (review)

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism ed. by Keith Newlin Renate von Bardeleben (bio) The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, edited by Keith Newlin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 521 pp. Cloth, $150.00, €119.99. Review Editor's note: we have not reviewed this book in Studies in American Naturalism previously because of a sense of conflict: its editor is our co-editor and many of its contributors are our regular contributors and members of our editorial board. So we left the Handbook to be reviewed elsewhere, trusting it to stand on its merits. The detailed review essay below, by an international scholar of literary naturalism, is written from an international perspective and directed primarily at international scholars. It was not only interesting to us to see what an international reader makes of it; we also found the larger perspective the reviewer offers on the expanding scope and influence of literary naturalism on writers and scholars alike bracing. We offer it here in the hope that our readers, domestic and international, will find its larger view of that scope and influence matter for thought. This book opens up a panorama of American literary naturalism from its beginnings in the 1890s to the present. The leading figures, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London, are here, surrounded by a host of authors linked by narrative technique or by ideology to a mode of presenting life in all its vagaries and the complexities of human actions and failures. Reading it one is reminded that the critics dedicated to the study of naturalism likewise form a closely knit web headed by the leading theorists of the movement, Charles Child Walcutt and Donald Pizer, who have contributed significantly to defining the ideological and historical background and to establishing the different phases of naturalist writing. Critical interest in American literary naturalism gained momentum in the 1960s, and the past fifty years have seen new biographies and new, complete, and unabridged editions of the canonical authors. [End Page 246] But though author societies such as the Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright societies meet regularly at the annual conferences of the American Literature Association and also intermittently on special occasions such as centennials of publication of major works, naturalism is still frequently subsumed under the label American realism, or it is presented as a short-lived development along the historical path between realism and modernism. A careful reading of the Oxford Handbook suggests, however, that American naturalism can no longer be confined to what is now called the first or classic period from 1890 to 1915. Rather, literary naturalism is an ongoing movement and mode of writing employed by American authors up to the present day, and the work of scholars of American naturalism touches on the most pertinent current debates in the study of American literary history. The Oxford Handbook both reminds us that the movement has had continuing impact on American letters and fills a gap in the scholarship. Even though there are numerous studies in American naturalism that cover a range of important topics from determinism, regionalism, modernity, (anti-)aesthetics, and gender issues to historically oriented studies on the 19th and 20th centuries, all these works provide, as the editor says, "only a partial picture," and one might add, while still helpful, quite a few are somewhat dated in their approach. There has long been need for a comprehensive treatment of the subject both topically and thematically. The scope of the Handbook is ambitious: an introduction plus twenty-eight essays arranged in six groups and presented in a systematic order, partly chronological, partly thematic, and partly generic. Some of the essays might have functioned in other contexts and there are overlapping passages and some redundancies and gaps, but the overall effect is of thorough, reliable, and competent information; readers will emerge acquainted with the major naturalist writers, poets, and playwrights of an entire century and informed about their objectives and methods and influence. As a milestone in studies of American naturalism, the Handbook deserves a space in the student's or scholar's library. The Handbook...

Reviews/Interviews

Adam Sumera: Capital Ellowen Deeowen: A Review of The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature by Sebastian Groes (Houndsmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011) Wit Pietrzak: Deconstruction and Liberation: A Review of Simon Glendinning’s Derrida (New York: Oxford UP, 2011) Monika Kocot: Authenticity, Transdifference, Survivance: Native American Identity (Un)Masked: A Review of Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies, ed. Deborah L. Madsen (Albany: State U of New York P, 2010) Fadia Faqir Speaks with Maria Assif: Literature, the Arab Diaspora, Gender and Politics Norman Ravvin Talks to Krzysztof Majer: Absent Fathers, Outsider Perspectives and Yiddish Typewriters

Reconstructing the native South: American Indian literature and the lost cause

In Reconstructing the Native South, Melanie Benson Taylor examines the diverse body of Native American literature in the contemporary U.S. South--literature written by the descendants of tribes who evaded Removal and have maintained ties with their southeastern homelands. In so doing Taylor advances a provocative, even counterintuitive claim: that the U.S. and its Native American survivors have far more in common than mere geographical proximity. Both cultures have long been haunted by separate histories of loss and nostalgia, Taylor contends, and the moments when those experiences converge in explicit and startling ways have yet to be investigated by scholars. These convergences often bear the scars of protracted colonial antagonism, appropriation, and segregation, and they share preoccupations with land, sovereignty, tradition, dispossession, subjugation, purity, and violence.Taylor poses difficult questions in this work. In the aftermath of Removal and colonial devastation, what remains--for Native and non-Native southerners--to be recovered? Is it acceptable to identify an Indian lost cause? Is a deep sense of hybridity and intercultural affiliation the only coherent way forward, both for the New and for its oldest inhabitants? And in these newly entangled, postcolonial environments, has global capitalism emerged as the new enemy for the twenty-first century? Reconstructing the Native South is a compellingly original work that contributes to conversations in Native American, southern, and transnational American studies.

Apples and ashes: literature, nationalism, and the Confederate States of America

Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly. Apples and Ashe s is organised by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hutchison discusses an understudied and diverse archive of literary texts including the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin ; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; Confederate popular poetry; the de facto Confederate national anthem, Dixie; and several postwar southern memoirs. In addition to emphasising the centrality of slavery to the Confederate literary imagination, the book also considers a series of novel topics: the reprinting of European novels in the Confederate South, including Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables ; Confederate propaganda in Europe; and postwar Confederate emigration to Latin America. In discussing literary criticism, fiction, poetry, popular song, and memoir, Apples and Ashe s reminds us of Confederate literature's once-great expectations. Before their defeat and abjection--before apples turned to ashes in their mouths--many Confederates thought they were in the process of creating a nation and a national literature that would endure.