American Mythologies : essays on contemporary literature / edited by William Blazek and Michael K. Glenday.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Blazek, William, editor.

Glenday, Michael K., editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--Indian authors.

Indian mythology in literature.

Race in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 305 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2005.

Summary:

This challenging new book looks at the current reinvention of American Studies: a reinvention that, among other things, has put the whole issue of just what is 'American' and what is 'American Studies' into contention. The collection focuses, in particular, on American mythology. The editors themselves have written essays that examine the connections between mythologies of the United States and those of either classical European or Native American traditions. William Blazek considers Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine novels as chronicles combining Ojibwa mythology and contemporary U.S. culture in ways that reinvest a sense of mythic identity within a multicultural, postmodern America. Michael K Glenday's analysis of Jayne Anne Phillips' work and explores in it the contexts where myth and dream interact with each other. Betty Louise Bell is one of four essayists in this collection who focus their criticism on authors of Native American heritage. In the first part of 'Indians with Voices', Bell carefully argues that Roy Harvey Pearce's seminal Native American studies text Savagism and Civilization fails to acknowledge its white elitist assumptions about what constitutes The American Mind and views Native Americans along a primitive-savage binary that helped to create a twentieth-century 'national mythos of innocence and destiny'. Other essays include Christopher Brookeman's study of the impact of Muhammad Ali on Norman Mailer's non-fiction writing about heavyweight boxing.

Contents:

Indians with voices: revisiting Savagism and civilization

Wild hope: love, money and mythic identity in the novels of Louise Erdich

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee: mythologies of representation in selected writings on boxing by Norman Mailer

The secret sharing: myth and memory in the writing of Jayne Anne Phillips

The individual's ghost: towards a new mythology of the postmodern

'Cheap, on sale, American dream': contemporary Asian American writers' responses to American success mythologies

'No way back forever': American western myth in Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy

Native American visions of apocalypse: prophecy and protest in the fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor

The brave new world of computing in post-war American science fiction

Mythologies of 'estactic immersion': America, the poem and ethics of lyric in Jorie Graham and Lisa Jarnot

Whose myth is it anyway? Coyote in the poetry of Gary Snyder and Simon J. Ortiz

Aging, anxious and apocalyptic: baseball's myths for the millennium

Finding a voice, telling a story: constructing communal identity in contemporary American women's writing.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 07 Jul 2017).

ISBN:

1-78138-610-2

OCLC:

476209074