Literary Significance and Reception
- The novel has been commended for the way it stresses the importance of history in the current lives of a Native American group as they struggle in the quest of decolonization. Taos Pueblo scholar and critic P. Jane Hafen said of the novel in 2002: "Howe seamlessly integrates a history of desperate and gruesome fights for survival with modern Faustian pacts with materialism and wealth. At the heart of the story are generations of Choctaw peoples who preserve with ritual gestures of 'life everlasting'"
- Shell Shaker furthermore stands out as one of the few novels to focus on Choctaw history from the point of view of a native author. Ken McCullough has said of the novel "Although there has been significant scholarship on this historical period in the southeast, between the arrival of De Soto and Removal, no one has written a work of the imagination (of this magnitude) set in this period"
- The novel presents characters separate from the ideas present in American culture. "The variations in voice among the protagonists show that Howe knows how to imagine different characters, and those figures confirm and challenge stereotypes about Native Americans in a way that can only be productive for all readers."
Read more about this topic: Shell Shaker
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or reception:
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“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
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