Native America can look to few more inventive or prolific contemporary writers than Gerald Vizenor. He is the author of Bearheart, Griever: An American Monkey King in China, The Trickster of Liberty, The Heirs of Columbus, Dead Voices, and Hotline Healers. Add to these his poetry, stories, plays, anthologies, screenplays, and his autobiography Interior Landscapes, and one has a voice at once full of Native irony and the postmodern turn.
The seventeen essays gathered in this volume take the measure of Vizenor’s achievement. Among the contributors are leading Native American writers Louis Owens, Arnold Krupat, Elaine A. Jahner, and Barry O’Connell.
A. Robert Lee is a British scholar previously at the University of Kent at Canterbury where he taught American Studies. He has been a frequent Visiting Professor in the USA, among others, at Northwestern University, The University of Colorado and the University of California at Berkeley. Currently he is Professor of American Literature, Nihon University, Tokyo. His publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998); eleven volumes in the Vision Press Critical Series, from Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945 (1980) to William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Fiction (1990); Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader (1994) and, with Gerald Vizenor, Postindian Conversations (1999); and the essay-collections A Permanent Etcetera: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Post-War America (1993), Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction (1995), (with W. M. Verhoeven) Making America/Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper (1996), and The Beat Generation Writers (1996).