Dreams of Fiery Stars Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book. One of the most sophisticated studies to date of Native Amercan fiction. . . . Rainwater's book finds its targets and explodes much if not most of the nonsense that has been written about Native American novels and, by extension, Native American literature, art, dance, drama, and tradition.
Rainwater refocuses attention on the evolution of and diversity among Native writers.
While their works have found an audience by observing many of the conventions of the mainstream novel, Native American written narrative has emerged as something distinct from the postmodern novel with which it is often compared. In Dreams of Fiery Stars, Catherine Rainwater examines the novels of writers such as Momaday, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich and contends that the very act of writing narrative imposes constraints upon these authors that are foreign to Native American tradition. The book focuses on the agenda of social and cultural regeneration encoded in contemporary Native American narrative, and addresses key questions about how these works achieve their overtly stated political and revisionary aims. Catherine Rainwater is Associate Professor of English at St. Edward's University.