The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature

Joy Porter is a lecturer in the Department of American Studies at the University of Wales, Swansea, where she teaches a range of courses on American and Native American history and literature. She is the author of To Be Indian: The Life of Seneca-Iroquois Arthur Caswell Parker, 1881-1955 (2002). Her work on Indian themes can be found in a variety of journals and books such as New York History and The State of US History (Berg 2002). Previously she was Senior Lecturer in American History at Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, where she established a range of courses on Indian and American history. Her next book is Native American Freemasonry, the research for which was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Kenneth M. Roemer, an Academy of Distinguished Teachers Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, has received four NEH grants to direct Summer seminars and has been a Visiting Professor in Japan, a guest lecturer at Harvard, and lectured in Vienna, Lisbon, Brazil, and Turkey. His articles have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Modern Fiction Studies. His Approaches to Teaching Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain (ed.) was published by the MLA; his Native American Writers of the United States (ed.) won a Writer of Year Award from Wordcraft Circle. He has written four books on utopian literature, including The Obsolete Necessity and Utopian Audiences. His collection of personal narratives, verse, and photography about Japan is entitled Michibata de Deatta Nippon (A Sidewalker's Japan).

• Introduction Kenneth M. Roemer; Time line: literary, historical and cultural conjunctions Kenneth M. Roemer; Part I. Historical and Cultural Contexts: 1. Historical and cultural contexts to Native American literature Joy Porter; 2. Translation and mediation David Murray; 3. Women writers and gender issues Annette Van Dyke; Part II. Genre Contexts: 4. Non-fiction prose Bernd Peyer; 5. Native American life writing Hertha D. Sweet Wong; 6. America's indigenous poetry Norma C. Wilson; 7. Pre-1968 fiction A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff; 8. Fiction: 1968 to the present James Ruppert; 9. American Indian theatre Ann Haugo; Part III. Individual Authors: 10. N. Scott Momaday: becoming the bear Chadwick Allen; 11. Simon Ortiz: writing home Patricia Clark Smith; 12. James Welch: identity, circumstance and chance Kathryn W. Shanley; 13. Leslie Marmon Silko: storyteller Robert M. Nelson; 14. Gerald Vizenor: postindian liberation Kimberly M. Blaeser; 15. Louise Erdrich's storied universe Catherine Rainwater; 16. Joy Harjo's poetry Laura Coltelli; 17. Sherman Alexie: irony, intimacy, and agency David L. Moore; Bio-bibliographies; Further reading; Index.

'An impressive collection of essays! Porter and Roemer have nicely framed a conversation by scholars on what native literature was, is, and will become in the 21st century. Readers will find diversity in this volume - and by that I mean essays on poetry, fiction, history, and theater, and culture.' LeAnne Howe, Author of Shell Shaker