Robert Gish Beyond Bounds

Annotation

A healthy disrespect for cultural exclusiveness marks the essays collected here, a series of appreciations and explications of writers not often considered together. Here Robert Gish shares with us not only his recent enthusiasms—he was among the first critics to consider such minority writers as Rudolfo Anaya, James Welch, Ray Young Bear, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, and his essays on them serve as excellent introductions to their work—but also his continuing appreciation for the Southwestern Anglo writers he grew up on. Today Charles Lummis, Erna and Harvey Fergusson, and Witter Bynner are often dismissed as paternalistic outsiders or colonialists. In disentangling their literary strengths from these stereotypes, Gish reminds us that we gain nothing from exclusivity. His openness to the varieties of American literature will make this book especially useful to students and teachers in college and high school literature classes.