Louise Erdrich is one of the most critically and commercially successful Native American writers. This book is the first fully comprehensive treatment of Erdrich’s writing, analysing the textual complexities and diverse contexts of her work to date. Drawing on the critical archive relating to Erdrich’s work and Native American literature, Stirrup explores the full depth and range of her authorship.
Breaking Erdrich’s oeuvre into several groupings – poetry, early and late fiction, memoir and children’s writing – Stirrup develops individual readings of both the critical arguments and the texts themselves. He argues that Erdrich’s work has developed an increasing political acuity to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Native American literatures. Erdrich’s insistence on being read as an American writer is shown to be in constant and mutually-inflecting dialogue with her Ojibwe heritage.
This sophisticated analysis is of use to students and readers at all levels of engagement with Erdrich’s writing.
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1. Native American literature: authorship and authority
2. ‘I thought I would be sliced in two’: towards a geocultural poetics
3. Spatial relations: the Love Medicine tetralogy and Tales of Burning Love
4. From the cities to the plains: recent fiction
5. Working together, working apart: collaboration, (auto)biography, and pedagogy
Conclusion? Tradition, translation, and the global market for Native American literatures
Bibliography
About the author
David Stirrup is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Kent
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