Native North American Authorship: Text, Breath, Modernity

“With dazzling breadth and depth, A. Robert Lee analyzes a rich spectrum of Native voices, some well-known, others less often heard, placing them in a medley of illuminating contexts. He writes of all genres with agility, in his own inimitable critical idiom. This valuable book crowns Lee’s achievement in Native North American scholarship.”
—Cathy Covell Waegner, editor, Mediating Indianness (2015)

“This brilliant and highly engaging collection of essays by A. Robert Lee is the perfect companion for readers of Native North American poetry and prose who wish to go deeper: to discover, through close attention to text, ways in which each author’s biographical and sociocultural influences have informed their own writings, and ways in which these writings have, collectively, shaped the various literary trends which contextualize them. The result of Lee’s deft cross-referencing is a breathtaking tour-de-force.”
—Ingrid Wendt, author of Evensong (2011)

“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