Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction

by Robert M. Nelson

In a work which promises to be a major contribution to both literary and Native studies, Place and Vision explores the role of physical landscape as both source and shaper of individual and cultural identies in three important contemporary Native American novels. Consistent with Native views on how individuals and the land are indivisibly related, Nelson argues that although Leslie Silko's Ceremony , N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn , and James Welch's The Death of Jim Loney share with other postwar American fictions a thematic concern with alienation, their protagonists show alienation to be a curable disease by regrounding their visions of selfhood in clear visions of place. In addition, Nelson shows how geographical realism functions to verify and validate the creative visions informing these works as well as to make them more accessible to non-Native readers.

189 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993