Studies in the Literary Achievement of Louise Erdrich, Native American Writer: Fifteen Critical Essays

The fifteen essays gathered in this volume, written by leading scholars of Native American literature, explore Chippewa and German-American Louis Erdrich's fiction from multiple perspectives, offering creative and cultural contexts, thematic considerations and close reading of some of her recent novels. This title was awarded the Adele Mellen Prize for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. This work is a collection of critical essays on the fiction and scholarship of one of Native America's most loved and respected writers. Drawing on her Chippewa and German-American heritage, Erdrich has produced a body of work whose pervasive mythical landscape and the cast of interconnected characters has been credited with bringing Native American literature to the literary mainstream and inspiring an entire generation of Native American writing. Her eleven North Dakota novels constitute a web of complex, absorbing narratives documenting familial, political and social histories over a century of tumultuous change. Erdrich's blending of Native oral and western traditions demand multilayered critical approaches. The essays relate to different issues relevant to her fiction, in particular the categorization of her work as Native American, but also questions about genre, gender, structure, narrative voice, authorship, and the ethics and politics of fiction labeled as Native American. Peter G. Beidler's essay, for example, investigates the use of medical terms as source of humor in "Four Souls". Tom Matchie in his essay explores parallels between use of grotesque in Erdrich and Flannery O'Connor. Alan R. Velie examines dialectics of the Indian aesthetics and western literary forms in her fiction. Annette Van Dyke in her study of Agnes-Damien's role in "The Last Report" shows how the reader's perspectives change with a change in Agnes' role. Deborah L. Madsen and Barbara Hiles Mesle explore Erdrich's fiction from the perspective of trauma theory in the Native American context. Harry J. Brown's essay on the function of naming in her fiction, Holly Messitt in his comparative study of early American captivity narratives and Erdrich's fiction, David T. McNab in his study of death and dying in her fiction - all hint at the possibility of scholarship that Erdrich's fiction can spawn.