Abstract
Neither of the two smaller American literatures discussed below has a long written tradition comparable to that of Wales, Ireland, or Scotland. Native American literature, and (less obviously) Chicano literature (produced primarily by the Hispanic culture of the American South-West) nevertheless have strong oral traditions. Two minor historical details, on the other hand, have a certain emblematic significance in this context: the oldest continuously occupied site in the United States (approximately a thousand years old) is Oraibi, a mesa village of the Hopi Indians in the middle of the Navajo reservation in north-east Arizona; similarly, the oldest surviving public building in America is the Casa de los Gobernadores, or Palace of the Governors (1610), seat of successive Spanish-speaking administrations in Santa Fe. Here, in a nutshell, are dramatic symbols of “our” land and “our” language respectively, both of which pre-date any significant English influence in the United States.
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Further Reading
British Isles
For Wales, Meic Stephens’s Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales (1986) is extremely useful. Raymond Garlick’s An Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1970) is partly superseded by
Roland Mathias’s Anglo-Welsh Literature: An Illustrated History (Bridgend: Poetry of Wales Press, 1986).
Caradoc Evans’s My People exists in a modern edition (Bridgend: Poetry of Wales Press, 1987), with a helpful introduction by John Harris.
For Ireland, a good starting point is Seamus Deane’s A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1986), which may be supplemented by
Norman Vance’s Irish Literature: A Social History: Tradition, Identity and Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
Declan Kiberd’s most useful books are his Synge and the Irish Language (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993) and the magnificent Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
For Scotland, Maurice Lindsay’s authoritative History of Scottish Literature (London: Robert Hale, 1992) is obviously helpful, but not as useful as
Trevor Royle’s Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1993). There is a valuable collection of essays on contemporary Scottish fiction:
The Scottish Novel since the Seventies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), edited by Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson. Most illuminating of all, however, is
Robert Crawford’s remarkable Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), a study that moves far beyond Scottish literature and discusses some of the issues raised in The Stepmother Tongue.
Billy Kay’s Scots: The Mither Tongue (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1986) is a partisan but extremely lucid account of Scots, memorable for occasionally resorting to that language when it simply expresses a point more pithily than English.
North America
For Native American fiction, the large research guide Native American Literature, edited by Janet Witalec and published by Gale Research Incorporation (New York, 1994), is indispensable. Volume 175 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1997), edited by Kenneth M. Roemer, covers Native American writers of the United States. This may be supplemented by
Penny Petrone’s Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Also of interest are Our Bit of Truth: An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature (Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 1990), edited by Agnes Grant, and Hartmut Lutz’s Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Native Canadian Authors (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1991).
Invaluable aids for Chicano fiction are those volumes (82 and 122) of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1989 and 1992) which deal with Chicano writers. Both are edited by Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley.
Houston A. Baker produced the informative Three American Literatures: Essays in Chicano, Native American, and Asian-American Literature for Teachers of American Literature (New York: Modern Language Association, 1982). Other helpful guides are
Martin A. Lewis’s Introduction to the Chicano Novel (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin, 1982) and
Contemporary Chicano Fiction: A Critical Survey (Binghamton, NY: Bilingual/Editorial Bilingüe, 1985), edited by Vernon E. Lattin. Denys Lynn Daly Heyck’s collection Barrios and Borderlands: Cultures of Latinos and Latinas in the United States (New York: Routledge, New York, 1994) has much background material, while Memory and Cultural Politics, a volume in the New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures series (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), edited by Amrirjit Singh et al., has essays on Chicano fiction.
Bruce Novoa’s Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980) is an important collection.
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© 1998 John Skinner
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Skinner, J. (1998). North America. In: The Stepmother Tongue. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26898-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26898-6_10
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