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When the impulse toward innovation arises late in a writer's career, it is often accompanied by a sense of urgency, and the result, as Narrative Innovation and Incoherence demonstrates, raises important questions for literary theory. Michael M. Boardman considers this pressing struggle to find a new form as it appears in the later works of Defoe, Goldsmith, Austen, Eliot, and Hemingway. He analyzes how these authors react to new and compelling beliefs for which a previous way of writing is no longer adequate.
Urgent innovations, in this account, can only be understood as unique, individual responses to crises in belief. Taking as a point of departure French theorist Althusser's conviction that ideology is intelligible only through structure, Boardman searches for an explanation of both form and ideology not in Marxist concepts of base and superstructure but in the particular structure of an individual artist's writing career. Narrative ideology here becomes more complex than is generally assumed.
Theoretically informed yet avoiding essentializing explanations of narrative invention, Narrative Innovation and Incoherence offers unexpected insights into the multifaceted relations between form and belief. It will encourage serious students of the novel to reexamine the importance of poetics as a mediating factor in the means of production.

Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives, edited by Divya Dwivedi, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Richard Walsh, brings together many of the most prominent figures in the interface between narratology and postcolonial criticism. While narrative theory has for some time recognized the importance of context in the analysis of fiction, this recognition has not quickly translated into substantial work in fields like postcolonialism, where situated questions of value and ideology have been brought to the fore. Postcolonial criticism, on the other hand, has often neglected the formal qualities of fiction in preference for ideological thematic interpretations, precisely because of the suspect legacy of formalism. The volume, then, stages a meeting between these two fields, negotiating both narratological and postcolonialist concerns by addressing specific features of narrative form and technique in the ideological analysis of key postcolonial texts.
 
The thirteen essays in Narratology and Ideology offer compelling readings of individual novels, with a focus upon South Asian literature, that provide a cumulative case study on the value of postcolonial narratology. The essays show not only how narrative theory can be productively applied in service of postcolonial criticism but also how such attention to postcolonial fictions can challenge and refine our theoretical understanding of narrative.

Beliefs and feelings about language vary dramatically within and across Native American cultural groups and are an acknowledged part of the processes of language shift and language death. This volume samples the language ideologies of a wide range of Native American communities--from the Canadian Yukon to Guatemala--to show their role in sociocultural transformation.

These studies take up such active issues as "insiderness" in Cherokee language ideologies, contradictions of space-time for the Northern Arapaho, language socialization and Paiute identity, and orthography choices and language renewal among the Kiowa. The authors--including members of indigenous speech communities who participate in language renewal efforts--discuss not only Native Americans' conscious language ideologies but also the often-revealing relationship between these beliefs and other more implicit realizations of language use as embedded in community practice.

The chapters discuss the impact of contemporary language issues related to grammar, language use, the relation between language and social identity, and emergent language ideologies themselves in Native American speech communities. And although they portray obvious variation in attitudes toward language across communities, they also reveal commonalities--notably the emergent ideological process of iconization between a language and various national, ethnic, and tribal identities.

As fewer Native Americans continue to speak their own language, this timely volume provides valuable grounded studies of language ideologies in action--those indigenous to Native communities as well as those imposed by outside institutions or language researchers. It considers the emergent interaction of indigenous and imported ideologies and the resulting effect on language beliefs, practices, and struggles in today's Indian Country as it demonstrates the practical implications of recognizing a multiplicity of indigenous language ideologies and their impact on heritage language maintenance and renewal.

Cultural changes over the past two decades have led to a proliferation of new social movements in Europe and the United States. New social movements such as ecology, peace, ethnicity, New Age philosophies, alternative medicine, and gender and sexual identity are among those that are emerging to challenge traditional categories in social movement theory. Synthesizing classic and modern perspectives the contributors help to redefine the field of social movements and advance an understanding of them through cross-cultural research, comparison with older movements, and an examination of the dimensions of identity—individual, collective, and melding of the two.