Kirjahaku

Lincoln's study of Native American humour moves from tribal culture to interethnic literature. He covers the traditional Trickster of origin myths, historical ironies (speeches, treatises, as-told-to life stories), Euroamericans `playing Indian', Feminist Indian home humour, contemporary painters and playwrights reinventing Coyote, popular mixed-blood music and Red English, and three Native American novelists, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and N. Scott Momaday, as well as a bicultural novel, The Northern Lights, by Howard Norman.

"Native American Renaissance is the most important discussion of contemporary American Indian poetry and fiction produced to date. It offers intelligent and balanced insight into the contexts and work of a number of contemporary American Indian writers. Its careful discussion provides clear and sometimes breathtaking illumination into this literature that is at once tribal and modern, western and traditional, a literature that is the oldest and newest literature in America." (Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna), University of California, Berkeley). "This is a pioneering volume. Lincoln presents the writing of today's most gifted Native American authors, against an ethnographic background which should enable a growing number of readers to share his enthusiasm. Lincoln has lived with American Indians, knows them, and is respected by them; all this enhances his book." (William Bright, Editor, Language). "This is the most informed and insightful assessment of the best of modern Native American literature. Lincoln is sensitive to the tribal roots of this literature, so he is able to go beyond mere criticism to cultural contextualization. I found this study quite powerful in its scope, probing depth, imaginative sweep, and sensitivity of writing. Debate on the subject may well gather around Native American Renaissance for the rest of the decade." (Alfonso Ortiz (San Juan), University of New Mexico).

Examining contemporary poetry by way of ethnicity and gender, Kenneth Lincoln tracks the Renaissance invention of the Wild Man and the recurrent Adamic myth of the lost Garden. He discusses the first anthology of American Indian verse, "The Path on the Rainbow" (1918), which opened Jorge Luis Borges' university surveys of American literature, to thirty-five contemporary Indian poets who speak to, with, and against American mainstream bards. From Whitman's free verse, through the Greenwich Village Renaissance (sandwiched between the world wars) and the post-apocalyptic Beat incantations, to transglobal questions of tribe and verse at the century's close, Lincoln shows where we mine the mother lode of New World voices, what distinguishes American verse, which tales our poets sing and what inflections we hear in the rhythms, pitches, and parsings of native lines. Lincoln presents the Lakota concept of 'singing with the heart of a bear' as poetry which moves through an artist. He argues for a fusion of estranged cultures, tribal and emigre, margin and mainstream, in detailing the ethnopoetics of Native American translation and the growing modernist concern for a 'native' sense of the 'makings' of American verse. This fascinating work represents a major new effort in understanding American and Native American literature, spirituality, and culture.

Speak Like Singing focuses on select Native American writers showcasing the distinct voices and tribal diversities of living Indians. Through the pan-tribal medium of English, a second language for some and now a mother tongue for most, many of these Native writers begin as poets and go on to write novels. Pulitzer novelist and Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday says, "I believe that a good many Indian writers rely upon a kind of poetic expression out of necessity, a necessary homage to the native tradition." Black Elk remembers the wanekia or "make-live" prophet of his Lakota Ghost Dance vision "spoke like singing." The leaves, grasses, waters, leggeds, wingeds, and crawling beings all listened and danced. "They were better able now to see the greenness of the world," Black Elk says, after heyoka curing songs, "the wideness of the sacred day, the colors of the earth, and to set these in their minds." This book honors that talk-song vision for all relatives. "Scholar, novelist, and essayist Ken Lincoln blends his fierce cultural commitments and propulsive, lyrical prose in page after page of this passionate yet reference-rich book, persuading us that native dream songs, ritual liturgies, trickster narratives, and modern novels deserve to sit at every table of American literature."--Peter Nabokov, author of Native American Testimony and Where Lightning Strikes"Lincoln is that rarity among literary critics, a paragon of empathy and generosity; he immerses himself, he rejoices in it. The proof lies in the burn and torsion of his prose that heartens his intelligence and extraordinary learning."--Cal Bedient, author of Eight Contemporary PoetsAmerican Indian authors included: Sherman AlexieSherwin BitsuiLouise Erdrich Joy HarjoLinda HoganN. Scott Momaday Greg SarrisLeslie Silko Luci apahonsoJames Welch