Indigenous folk literature, Indigenous folk Literature -- West (U.S.) -- History and criticism, Indigenous literature, Indigenous literature -- West (U.S.) -- History and criticism, United States 

"Reading the Fire engages America’s “first literatures,” traditional Native American tales and legends, as literary art and part of our collective imaginative heritage. This revised edition of a book first published to critical acclaim in 1983 includes four new essays.

Drawing on ethnographic data and regional folklore, Jarold Ramsey moves from origin and trickster narratives and Indian ceremonial texts, into interpretations of stories from the Nez Perce, Clackamas Chinook, Coos, Wasco, and Tillamook repertories, concluding with a set of essays on the neglected subject of Native literary responses to contact with Euroamericans. In his finely worked, erudite analyses, he mediates between an author-centered, print-based narrative tradition and one that is oral, anonymous, and tribal, adducing parallels between Native texts and works by Shakespeare, Yeats, Beckett, and Faulkner."--Amazon. 

Contents:
1. Creations and Origins --
2. Coyote and Friends: An Experiment in Interpretive Bricolage --
3. The Poetry and Drama of Healing: The Iroquoian Condolence Ritual and the Navajo Night Chant --
4. From Mythic to Fictive in a Nez Perce Orpheus Myth --
5. "The Hunter Who Had an Elk for a Guardian Spirit," and the Ecological Imagination --
6. The Wife Who Goes Out like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives --
7. Uncursing the Misbegotten in a Tillamook Incest Story --
8. Genderic and Racial Appropriation in Victoria Howard's "The Honorable Milt" [Howard] --
9. Simon Fraser's Canoe; or, Capsizing into Myth [Fraser]. 10. Fish-Hawk and Other Heroes --
11. Retroactive Prophecy in Western Indian Narrative --
12. The Bible in Western Indian Mythology --
13. Ti-Jean and the Seven-headed Dragon: Instances of Native American Assimilation of European Folklore --
14. Francis La Flesche's "The Song of Flying Crow" and the Limits of Ethnography [La Flesche] --
15. Tradition and Individual Talents in Modern Indian Writing [Indians, Indigenous, Aboriginal or Native peoples, First Nations].