Native North American Authorship

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.

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.

“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