Gordon Henry

Gordon Henry is Professor of English at Michigan State University. His poetry and fiction have been published in The Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, Stories Migrating Home, and <...

Nieves Pascual Soler

Nieves Pascual Soler is Senior Lecturer of North American Literature at the University of Jaén, Spain.

Silvia Martinez-Falquina

Silvia Martinez-Falquina is Associate Professor of English at the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza, Spain.

Stories Through Theories/Theories Through Stories
North American Indian Writing, Storytelling, and Critique

Gordon Henry

Nieves Pascual Soler

Silvia Martinez-Falquina

This collection explores the unique interplay of culture, history, and criticism in Native American stories: Stories Through Theories/Theories Through Stories explores the uneasy relations — often contentious, sometimes complicit — between American Indian Literature and literary theory. Some of the essays in this book open American Indian narratives to theoretical critique based on "western depth models." Others work from a very different direction, finding critique in storytelling and processes of narrative production, thereby exposing dimensions of literary theory that grow from the indigenous ground of Native stories themselves.

This collection of essays — sometimes playfully but always insistently — changes our readings of Native works and challenges our roles as intellectual guides until we step deeper into the ambiguous territories where writer, listener, reader, and critic intersect.

Taken together, these essays provide compelling evidence for looking at primary Native cultures, authors, and histories as enrichments of Native literature.

American Indian Studies Series