Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine A Casebook

by Wong, Hertha D. Sweet

• ISBN13: 9780195127225
• ISBN10: 0195127226
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-11-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Louise Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine , came out in 1984 to instant and international acclaim. A short story cycle narrated by a variety of different characters, the book chronicles the intertwined histories of Chippewa and mixed-blood families in North Dakota over half a century, laying bare the ordeals and joys of twentieth-century Native American life. Like the other books in the series, this Casebook presents important background material to establish the context of the novel, interviews with the author, and pivotal critical responses to the work.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 3
Contexts: History, Culture, and Storytelling
The Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota: Its History as Depicted in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and The Beet Queen	p. 13
From the Time Immemorial: Native American Traditions in Contemporary Short Fiction	p. 27
Love Medicine: Voices and Margins	p. 35
Where I Ought to Be: A Writer's Sense of Place	p. 43
Mixed Identities and Multiple Narratives
Erdrich and Dorris's Mixed-bloods and Multiple Narratives	p. 53
Celebrating Culture: Love Medicine	p. 67
Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: Narrative communities and the Short Story Cycle	p. 85
Interviews with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris	p. 107
Individual and Cultural Survival: Humor and Homecoming
"Her Laugh an Ace": The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine	p. 115
Opening the Text: Love Medicine and the Return of the Native American Woman	p. 136
Interviews with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris	p. 155
Reading Self/Reading Other
Reading between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich	p. 163
Reading Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine as Home Medicine	p. 179
Vision and Revision in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine	p. 211
Rose Nights, Summer Storms, Lists of Spiders and Literary Mothers	p. 220
Chronology of Events in Love Medicine	p. 225
Selected Bibliography	p. 229
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.