Document Type
Book
Publication Date
2003
Abstract
The writings of Louise Erdrich not only reflect their author’s multilayered, complex background but they also confound a variety of literary genre and cultural categories. Although Erdrich is known primarily as a successful contemporary Native American writer, her finely polished writing reveals both her Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Euroamerican heritages. Nevertheless, her diverse imageries, subjects, and textual strategies reaffirm imperatives of American Indian survival. She prescribes the literary challenge for herself and other contemporary Native writers in her essay “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place”: “In the light of enormous loss, [contemporary Native writers] must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe” (1). Standing at the center of her work is the acclaimed novel, Love Medicine (1984, revised and expanded 1993). Subsequent novels return to the themes, characters, and places established in Love Medicine and create an epic tale of survival among Ojibwe Indians in the northern plains.
Recommended Citation
Hafen, P. Jane. Reading Louise Erdich's 'Love Medicine'. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 2003. Digital. Western Writers Series, 158.