The outpouring of Native American literature that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn in 1968 continues unabated. Fiction and poetry, autobiography and discursive writing from such writers as James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko constitute what critic Kenneth Lincoln in 1983 termed the Native American Renaissance. This collection of essays takes the measure of that efflorescence.

The contributors scrutinize writers from Momaday to Sherman Alexie, analyzing works by Native women, First Nations Canadian writers,...