Native American Literature: Towards a Spatialized Reading

Native American Literature underwent a Renaissance around 1968, and the current canon of novels written in the late twentieth century in American English by Native American or mixed-blood authors is diverse, exciting and flourishing. Despite this, very few such novels are accepted as part of the broader American literary canon.

This book offers a valuable and original approach to contemporary Native American literature. Dennis’s contemplation of space and spatialized aesthetics is compelling and persuasive. Considering Native American literature within a modernist framework, and comparing it with writers such as Woolf, Stein, T.S Eliot and Proust results in a valuable and enriching context for the selected texts.

Vital reading for scholars of Native American Literature, this book will also provide good grounding in the subject for those with an interest in American and twentieth century literature more generally.

Helen May Dennis is a Senior Lecturer in North American Literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published on Elizabeth Bishop, Willa Cather, H.D., Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, medieval Provençal poetry, gender in American literature and culture, and North American women writers. She is the mother of three grown children, a grandmother and a poet.