The Essays In This Anthology Focus On Many Aspects Of Indian Fiction In English. It Seeks To Probe, Discuss And Analyse The Issues Arising Out Of The Novels And Offers Deep Insight To The Readers. Important Novelists Covered In The Volume Are : R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Anita Desai, Geeta Mehta, Salman Rushdie, Kavery Nambisan, Nayantara Sahgal, Arun Joshi, Shobha De And Arundhati Roy.
This first book-length critical analysis of the full range of novels written between 1854 and today by American Indian authors takes as its theme the search for self-discovery and cultural recovery. In his introduction, Louis Owens places the novels in context by considering their relationships to traditional American Indian oral literature as well as their differences from mainstream Euroamerican literature. In the following chapters he looks at the novels of John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, and Gerald Vizenor. These authors are mixedbloods who, in their writing, try to come to terms with the marginalization both of mixed-bloods and fullbloods and of their cultures in American society. Their novels are complex and sophisticated narratives of cultural survival - and survival guides for fullbloods and mixedbloods in modern America. Rejecting the stereotypes and cliches long attached to the word Indian, they appropriate and adapt the colonizers language, English, to describe the Indian experience. These novels embody the American Indian point of view; the non-Indian is required to assume the role of "other". In his analysis Owens draws on a broad range of literary theory: myth and folklore, structuralism, modernism, poststructuralism, and, particularly, postmodernism. At the same time he argues that although recent American Indian fiction incorporates a number of significant elements often identified with postmodern writing, it contradicts the primary impulse of postmodernism. That is, instead of celebrating fragmentation, ephemerality, and chaos, these authors insistupon a cultural center that is intact and recoverable, upon immutable values and ecological truths. Other Destinies provides a new critical approach to novels by American Indians. It also offers a comprehensive introduction to the novels, helping teachers bring this important fiction to the classroom.
Gerald Vizenor gives life to traditional tribal stories by presenting them in a new perspective: he challenges the idyllic perception of rural life, offering in its stead an unusual vision of survival in the cities-the sanctuaries for humans and animals. It is a tribal vision, a quest for liberation from forces that would deny the full realization of human possibilities. In this modern world his characters insist upon survival through an imaginative affirmation of the self. In Dead Voices Vizenor, using tales drawn from traditional tribal stories, illuminates the centuries of conflict between American Indians and Europeans, or "wordies." Bagese, a tribal woman transformed into a bear, has discovered a new urban world, and in a cycle of tales she describes this world from the perspective of animals-fleas, squirrels, mantis, crows, beavers, and finally Trickster, Vizenor’s central and unifying figure. The stories reveal unpleasant aspects of the dominate culture and American Indian culture such as the fur trade, the educational system, tribal gambling, reservation life, and in each the animals, who represent crossbloods, connect with their tribal traditions, often in comic fashion. As in his other fiction, Vizenor upsets our ideas of what fiction should be. His plot is fantastic; his story line is a roller-coaster ride requiring that we accept the idea of transformation, a key element in all his work. Unlike other Indian novelists, who use the novel as a means of cultural recovery, Vizenor finds the crossblood a cause for celebration.
The Fictional Scene In England, Immediately After The Second World War, Makes An Interesting Reading. Many Critical Studies Have, In Great Depth, Investigated The Historical Processes To Highlight The Various Directions The Novelists Moved In Then. At The Same Time, There Was A Concurrent And A Deliberate Attempt On The Part Of These Novelists To Discard The Heritage Of 'Modernism.' Iris Murdoch, Who Is One Of The Most Prominent Novelists Of This Period, Also Shared The Distrust Of Her Contemporaries For The So-Called Literary Radicalism. However, She Remains Distinct As A Writer Among Her Contemporaries, In Her Awareness Of The Problems Of The Novel And Language, In Her Adherence, Both To The Idealism About Human Potentiality And Perfectibility That Liberal Humanism Had Contained. But She Is Also Conscious Of The Limited Individual Capacity To Reach That Ideal. Her Creative Career Is Marked By Her Desire To Bring Back To The Novel, Some Of Its Earlier Comprehensive Vision Of Life, Society And Human Character.The Present Book Attempts To Reveal Those Important Areas Of Murdoch'S Thought Which Set Her Apart From Other Novelists Writing At That Time. Her Search For Literary Metaphors Which Aim At Restoring To Novel Some Of Its Lost Moorings Is A Significant, Almost Iconoclastic Effort. Taking Help From Her Non-Fictional Treatises, An Attempt Has Been Made In This Book To Highlight The Platonic Burden Of Her Literary And Aesthetic Creed.
Lurking in the caves of eastern New Mexico, Falke, a thousand-year-old vampire, chooses his next bride: Melissa Roanhorse, an Albuquerque teenager. To regain his granddaughter’s life, Michael Roanhorse, an old Navajo sheepherder wise to the power of myth, must outwit the vampire and his loyal coven. So begins A.A. Carr’s Eye Killers, a novel that combines the Eastern European legend of the vampire with the Navajo tale of the monster slayer. The songs of Michael Roanhorse’s childhood include potent chants passed down through his grandmother, who sang to him of Changing Woman and her Warrior Twins, Monster Slayer and Child of the Water. But Michael’s spiritual strength and his memory have waned with the years. Who is left to help reunite him with his family and his family with their heritage? Michael enlists Diana Logan, Melissa’s young English teacher, to wrestle Melissa from the vampire. But to conquer Falke they must also overpower his coven: Elizabeth, captured by Falke in the 1850s during her family’s journey along the Santa Fe Trail, and Hanna, once a prostitute in Old Albuquerque, who aspires to supplant Falke’s vampire reign. Michael must invoke ancient traditions to bring Melissa home. The elders undertake to teach Diana, but her Irish-American heritage has not prepared her for a fight against shape-shifting vampires who have lived-and murdered-for centuries. In Eye Killers, Carr delivers an imaginative clash of cultures-both a suspenseful thriller and a valid rendering of Navajo and Pueblo tribal life in contemporary New Mexico. His inventiveness, expressed through melodic prose and layers of fine storytelling, weaves new legends of the American Southwest.
"James Ruppert explores the bicultural nature of Indian writers and discusses strategies they employ in addressing several audiences at once: their tribe, other Indians, and other Americans. Helen Jaskoski analyzes the genre of autoethnography, or Indian historical writing, in an Ottawa writer's account of a smallpox epidemic. Kimberly Blaeser, a Chippewa, writes about how Indian writers reappropriate their history and stories of their land and people. Robert Allen Warrior, an Osage, examines the ideas of the leading Indian philosopher in America, Vine Deloria, Jr., who calls for a return to traditional tribal religions. Robert Berner exposes the incomplete myths and false legends pervading Indian views of American history. Alan Velie discusses the issue of historical objectivity in two Indian historical novels, James Welch's Fools Crow and Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus. Kurt M. Peters relates how Laguna Indians retained their culture and identity while living in the boxcars of the Santa Fe Railroad Indian Village at Richmond, California. Juana Maria Rodriguez examines power relations in Gerald Vizenor's narrative of a Dakota Indian accused of murder in 1967, "Thomas White Hawk." Finally, Gerald Vizenor, a Chippewa, discusses Indian conceptions of identity in contemporary America, including simulations he calls "postindian identity."".
The Book Brings Together A Collection Of Scholarly Papers On Different Issues Of Indian Fiction In English. It Makes An Intensive Study Of The Works Of The Novelists Who Have Helped In Shaping Indian English Fiction And Earned Reputation As Literary Jewels Of The World: Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, R.P. Jhabvala, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, B. Rajan, Shashi Deshpande, Khushwant Singh, Raj Kamal Jha And Arundhati Roy. The Research Papers, Written By Eminent Scholars, Reflect Their Critical Vitality And Interpretative Acumen. The Book Deepens The Existing Critical Responses And Also Explores The Unlit Corner Of Indo-English Fiction.
The Papers Collected In This Anthology Represent A Wide Spectrum Of Critical Interests Of Scholars Specialising In Indian Fiction In English Which Has Of Late Established A Powerful And Pervasive Presence On The World Literary Scene.The Widely Divergent Themes Of The Third Generation Indian Novelists Including Especially Immigrant Experience, Feminist Concerns And Gender Issues, Familial, Social, Psychological And Philosophical Problems Characterising Contemporary Indian Life And The Major Debates Centred Round Indian Fiction In English, Besides The Innovative Techniques, Have All Been Discussed In This Volume From Refreshingly New Perspectives.Among The Contributors To This Volume Are Some Of The Most Respected Scholars: John Thieme (England), Sandra Ponzanesi (Netherlands), Shaul Bassi (Italy), Basavaraj Naikar (India), Uma Parameswaran (Canada), Mary Conde (England), Christopher Rollason (France), Chandra Holm (Switzerland), Joel Kuortti (Finland) And Alessandra Contenti (Italy). Among The Novelists Discussed Are: Salman Rushdie, Shashi Deshpande, Bharati Mukherjee, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh And Arundhati Roy.
Myth-History Combine Marks The Ruling Motive Of The Contemporary Indian Novel In English.In Amitav Ghosh S The Circle Of Reason, Reason Makes A Full Circle And Is Subjected To Subversion Towards The End With A Post-Modern Ambivalence.In The Great Indian Novel, Shashi Tharoor Is Given To Gigantism Of History And Makes Great Political Personages Parade On The Dice Game Of National Politics, As A Part Of Post-Colonial Discourse. Salman Rushdie S Midnight S Children Is An Enabling Text . The Text Synchronises The Individual History With National History Lending It A Universal Significance.The Texts Seek To Picture The Socio-Political Situation Of Post-Independence India With A Post-Modern Urgency.
Native American fiction writers have confronted Euro-American narratives about Indians and the colonial world those narratives help create. These Native authors offer stories in which Indians remake this colonial world by resisting conquest and assimilation, sustaining their cultures and communities, and surviving. In Muting White Noise, James H. Cox considers how Native authors have liberated our imaginations from colonial narratives. Cox takes his title from Sherman Alexie, for whom the white noise of a television set represents the white mass-produced culture that mutes American Indian voices. Cox foregrounds the work of Native intellectuals in his readings of the American Indian novel tradition. He thereby develops a critical perspective from which to re-see the role played by the Euro-American novel tradition in justifying and enabling colonialism. By examining novels by Native authors—especially Thomas King, Gerald Vizenor, and Alexie—Cox shows how these writers challenge and revise colonizers’ tales about Indians. He then offers “red readings” of some revered Euro-American novels, including Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and shows that until quite recently, even those non-Native storytellers who sympathized with Indians could imagine only their vanishing by story’s end. Muting White Noise breaks new ground in literary criticism. It stands with Native authors in their struggle to reclaim their own narrative space and tell stories that empower and nurture, rather than undermine and erase, American Indians and their communities.
