This volume seeks to enrich teachers' and students' understanding of the fictional world Louise Erdrich creates and to address the challenges of teaching her novels and poetry. The first part of the book provides background readings that establish a context for teaching Erdrich and acquaint teachers with Native American traditions, history, customs, and culture--especially those of the Ojibwe, or Chippewa. In the second section, experienced teachers of Erdrich discuss the strategies they use to engage students in a sometimes unfamiliar world. Essays provide information on Erdrich's tribe, the...

James R. Giles examines the evolution of a literary tradition born with the rise of America's urban centers - American inner-city naturalism. Giles uses narrative distance to measure the evolution of this literary tradition, and he finds that the slum dweller who was introduced - and held at arm's length - by Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Jack London assumed center stage in the works of such leading twentieth-century writers as Richard Wright, John Rechy, and Joyce Carol Oates. Giles demonstrates that while Crane, Norris, and London saw the newly emerging ghetto as a source of sensational...

Since the publication in 1964 of his novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, which arguably achieved the status of a cult classic, Hubert Selby, Jr., has held a place as one of the foremost exponents of American underground literature. His work has yet to receive extensive critical attention, in part because of its deliberately shocking subject matter and its resistance to precise classification. In Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr., James R. Giles examines the writer's four novels and one collection of short stories to make the case that the full complexity of his fiction has not previously been...

Analyzes the response of fiction writers to the epidemic of urban American violence.

Because naturalism seems antithetical to modernism and literary existentialism, slight attention has been given to the existence of a contemporary, or post-World War II, naturalism. Indeed, the very term serves as a synonym for "old fashioned." While understandable, this view has contributed to the misunderstanding, if not neglect, of several American writers who came to prominence in the late 1940s and 1950s. James Jones coined the term "the unfound generation" to describe these writers. The career of Nelson Algren exemplifies this phenomenon.

Nelson Algren has always been an...