The Invention of Native American Literature - Hardcover

Parker, Robert Dale

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080144067X ISBN 13: 9780801440670

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2002

Synopsis

In an original, widely researched, and accessibly written book, Robert Dale Parker helps redefine the study of Native American literature by focusing on issues of gender and literary form. Among the writers Parker highlights are Thomas King, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ray A. Young Bear, some of whom have previously received little scholarly attention.

Parker proposes a new history of Native American literature by reinterpreting its concerns with poetry, orality, and Indian notions of authority. He also addresses representations of Indian masculinity, uncovering Native literature's recurring fascination with restless young men who have nothing to do, or who suspect or feel pressured to believe that they have nothing to do.

The Invention of Native American Literature reads Native writing through a wide variety of shifting historical contexts. In its commitment to historicizing Native writing and identity, Parker's work parallels developments in scholarship on other minority literatures and is sure to provoke controversy.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Dale Parker is Professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois. He is the author of Faulkner and the Novelistic Imagination; The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop; and'Absalom, Absalom!': The Questioning of Fictions.

Review:

"Robert Dale Parker places well-known contemporary works by Native American writers within the contexts of earlier novels, tribal histories, ethnographies, local newspapers, and international debates on ethnic literature. His sense of balance is evident in his ability to identify four significant patterns in modern Native American literature while also insisting that these patterns represent evolving issues that should not be used to confine Native American literature."

(Kenneth Roemer, University of Texas, Arlington)

"Criticism at the present time is expected to do many things: to historicize and contextualize, to advocate and demystify, to theorize, to read closely, and to reflect critically on its own premises and positioning. Rarely does one critic do all these things well, and more rarely still do we find them all done well within the covers of the same book. But Robert Parker in The Invention of Native American Literature does all these things superbly, and more: he manages in everything he does to communicate the pleasures, simple and complex, of reading these Native American novels and poems. Pleasure is the rarest quality of all in contemporary criticism, and so the most to be valued. Somebody ought to give this book a prize."

(Brian McHale, The Ohio State University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 080144067X
• ISBN 13: 9780801440670
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264