Faith Matters: Religion, Ethnicity, and Survival in Louise Erdrich's and Toni Morrison's Fiction

'Faith Matters' analyzes the connections between religion, ethnicity, and survival in the fiction of two of the best-known U.S.-American ethnic authors, the Nobel-Prize winning African American writer Toni Morrison and the internationally acclaimed Chippewa Indian Louise Erdrich. Drawing on the historical, literary, and theoretical background of their novels, the study exposes the central role of religion in the articulation of an independent ethnic identity for both writers. This interdisciplinary approach moves beyond the realm of fiction to acknowledge a distinctively ethnic understanding of religion, which revises the established view of an either radically secularized or fundamentally religious U.S.-American society. 'Faith Matters' thus offers a reinterpretation of the function of religion both in American ethnic culture and in the larger U.S.-American context.