TY - BOOK ID - 1651276 TI - American Mythologies : essays on contemporary literature AU - Blazek, William AU - Glenday, Michael K. PY - 2005 SN - 0853237468 9780853237464 9781846312540 184631254X 9781781386101 1781386102 0853237360 9780853237365 PB - Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, DB - UniCat KW - American literature KW - anno 1900-1999 KW - anno 2000-2009 KW - American literature. KW - Indian mythology in literature. KW - Race in literature. KW - History and criticism. KW - Indian authors. KW - Indian literature (American) UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:1651276 AB - 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. ER -