Native North American Authorship: Text, Breath, Modernity

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments – Introduction: Text, Breath, Modernity – Native American Renaissance: Timelines, Texts – Modern Native Life Writing: Telling You Now – Wordwalker: N. Scott Momaday Tryptich – The Full House in Her Hand: Leslie Marmon Silko – Web and House: Later Erdrich, Earlier Erdrich – Cross-Worlds: The Sight and Sound of James Welch – Storier: Postindian Trajectory in the Novels of Gerald Vizenor – Fiction Off and On Center: Sherman Alexie – Memory Theatre: The Fictions of Louis Owens – Changing Points of Compass: The Novel 1990s-2020s – Story Panorama: Anthology, Author Collection – Whole Parts: Scripting Diane Glancy’s ShortFiction – Dark Illumination: The Noir Story Collections of Stephen Graham Jones– Poetry Remembrance: Joy Harjo, Wendy Rose, Diane Glancy, Luci Tapahonso, Kimberly Blaeser – A Native Sense of Existence: The Poetries of Simon Ortiz, Ray A. Young Bear, Tommy Pico – Oklahoma International: Jim Barnes and the Sites of Imagination – Two Handed: Self and Habitat in the Poetry of Linda Hogan – Electronic Computer and Stub Pencil: The Writing-in of Ralph Salisbury – Epilogue: Native, North American, Authorship – About the Author – Index.

About the Author :
A. Robert Lee, a Britisher with degrees from the University of London who taught for three decades at the University of Kent, UK, was Professor in the English Department at Nihon University, Tokyo (1997-2011). His Native American work includes Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader (1994) and with Gerald Vizenor, Postindian Conversations (1999); Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004; editor, The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes (2009); Modern American Counter Writings: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010); the four-volume set Native American Writing (2011); and, editor with Alan R. Velie, The Native American Renaissance (2013). His Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America, 25th Anniversary Edition (2020) is also a Peter Lang publication.

Review :
“This book represents (in extraordinary breadth) a survey of Native American literary accomplishment over the now more than half-century since the inauguration of what has been called the Native American Renaissance. Using a close reading methodology it locates points of connection, both between the authors surveyed and also with their wider circle of literary and artistic contemporaries. It constitutes a strong argument for the rude health of Native American literatures as representing both continuation of tribal cultures into modernity and also difference from the settler society that surrounds them. It also represents an effort to understand the individual modalities of Indigenous experience, through an emphasis on the contradictory impulses of accommodation and resistance.” —James Mackay, European University, Cyprus “This brilliant and highly engaging collection of essays by A. Robert Lee is the perfect companion for readers of Native North American poetry and prose who wish to go deeper: to discover, through close attention to text, ways in which each author’s biographical and sociocultural influences have informed their own writings, and ways in which these writings have, collectively, shaped the various literary trends which contextualize them. The result of Lee’s deft cross-referencing is a breathtaking tour-de-force.” —Ingrid Wendt, author of Evensong (2011) “With dazzling breadth and depth, A. Robert Lee analyzes a rich spectrum of Native voices, some well-known, others less often heard, placing them in a medley of illuminating contexts. He writes of all genres with agility, in his own inimitable critical idiom. This valuable book crowns Lee’s achievement in Native North American scholarship.” —Cathy Covell Waegner, editor, Mediating Indianness (2015)