A new continent of liberty : Eunomia in Native American literature from Occom to Erdrich

Summary: "Beginning with transcriptions of speeches by Pontiac, Red Jacket, and Tecumseh, and letters penned by the Reverend Samson Occom, and extending through a range of fiction and nonfiction works by Black Hawk, Mourning Dove, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and others, A New Continent of Liberty looks closely at how these authors have sought to reclaim and redefine versions of autonomy against representative Euro-American authors spanning from Thomas Jefferson to Don DeLillo. In his previous book, Hamilton charted how a vital blending of natural and human law in which the self was subordinated to both the divine and a larger human community gradually declined (from the late nineteenth century onward) into an eventual hyperautonomy in which an effectively deified self stood in sterile isolation from the rest of the world. In this new book, he demonstrates how Native American literature recovers a version of what Euro-American literature gradually lost"--