Louis Owens

Writing Land and Legacy

Joe Lockard, A. Robert Lee

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780826360991
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy explores the wide-ranging oeuvre of this seminal author, examining Owens's work and his importance in literature and Native studies. Of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish American descent, Owens's work includes mysteries, novels, literary scholarship, and autobiographical essays. Louis Owens offers a critical introduction and thirteen essays arranged into three sections: "Owens and the World, " "Owens and California, " and "The Novels." The essays present an excellent assessment of Owens's literary legacy, noting his contributions to American literature, ethnic literature, and Native American literature and highlighting his contributions to a variety of theories and genres. The collection concludes with a coda of personal poetic reflections on Owens by Diane Glancy and Kimberly Blaeser. Libraries, students, scholars, and the general public interested in Native American literature and the landscape of contemporary US literature will welcome this reflective volume that analyzes a vast range of Louis Owens's imaginative fictions, personal accounts, and critical work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Stories Mainly True by Joe Lockard and A. Robert Lee
• Part 1. Owens and the World
• Chapter 1. Memory Theatre: Louis Owens’s Narratives of Remembering by A. Robert Lee
• Chapter 2. Louis Owens and Anti-Colonial Ghost Dances by Joe Lockard
• Chapter 3. Rethinking Wilderness: Louis Owens’s Wounded Landscapes and Eco-Gothic Specters by Paul Whitehouse
• Part 2. Owens and California
• Chapter 4. Louis Owens: Haunting California by Chris LaLonde
• Chapter 5. Louis Owens, California, and Indigenous Modernism by David Carlson
• Chapter 6. Reading Steinbeck, Reading California: Tracing the Development of Louis Owens’s Postindian Aesthetics by Billy J. Stratton
• Part 3. The Novels
• Chapter 7. Louis Owens’s Wolfsong and Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion in the Anthropocene by James Mackay
• Chapter 8. Literary Form and the Mythic Underpinnings of Louis Owens’s The Sharpest Sight by Alan R. Velie
• Chapter 9. “Eran Muy Crueles”: Requirements of Madness in Louis Owens’s Bone Game by David Moore
• Chapter 10. “The Past Was a White Man’s Illusion”: The Temporal Continuum and Trans/Nationalism in Louis Owens’s Nightland and Dark River by Birgit Dawes
• Chapter 11. Nightland—No Country for Old Men?: Louis Owens and Cormac McCarthy at Postmodern High Noon by Cathy Covell Waegner
• Chapter 12. “Like a Clown Shot Out of a Cannon”: Humor in Louis Owens’s Nightland by Joseph Coulombe
• Chapter 13. “Jake Nashoba Went Home”: Tribal Citizenship, Belonging, and Naturalization in Louis Owens’s Dark River by John Gamber
• Part 4. Coda
• Chapter 14. Letter to Louis by Diane Glancy
• Chapter 15. Of Nalusachito and the Course of Rivers by Kimberly Blaeser
• List of Contributors
• Index