ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines selected works by selected writers of Aboriginal literature, and many of the themes touched upon in the preceding discussion will be developed in more detail. It provides special attention to Arnold Krupat’s ethnocritical approach, with some mention of Walter Ong’s evolutionary model of language use and of Terry Goldie and the study of the indigenous image in Canadian literature. The book discusses the fracture in medieval philosophy in more detail, relating it to the fractured image of self that characterizes Western thought, and analyses the autobiography of Wilma Mankiller, former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. It looks at some dominant approaches to indigenous literature by indigenous critics, pointing out some inadequacies in these, while at the same time implying that Aboriginal ancestry is no guarantee of a critic’s proceeding from an Aboriginal worldview.
