This is a casebook on Louise Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine, which came out in 1984 to instant national acclaim, winning a National Book Circle Critics Award and launching a tetralogy which it would take Erdrich ten years to complete.

A Study Guide for Louise Erdrich's "Love Medicine," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

"A revised and expanded, comprehensive guide to the novels of Native American author Louise Erdrich from Love Medicine to The Painted Drum. Includes chronologies, genealogical charts, complete dictionary of characters, map and geographical details about settings, and a glossary of all the Ojibwe words and phrases used in the novels"--Provided by publisher.

Leading scholars critically explore three leading novels by Louise Erdrich, one of the most important and popular Native American writers working today.

Following the structure of other titles in the Continuum Introductions to Literary Genres series, Native American Literatures includes: A broad definition of the genre and its essential elements. A timeline of developments within the genre. Critical concerns to bear in mind while reading in the genre. Detailed readings of a range of widely taught texts. In-depth analysis of major themes and issues. Signposts for further study within the genre. A summary of the most important criticism in the field. A glossary of terms. An annotated, critical reading list. This book offers students, writers, and serious fans a window into some of the most popular topics, styles and periods in this subject. Authors studied in Native American Literatures include: N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Linda Hogan, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, Louis Owens, Thomas King, Michael Dorris, Simon Ortiz, Cater Revard and Daine Glancy

The two fields of contemporary Native American literature and culture exist in the tension between two literary traditions: the Native oral and literary tradition and the modern Western mainstream literary influence. In her North Dakota quartet Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), Native American mixedblood author, Louise Erdrich (b. 1954) exemplifies where and how these traditions meet and interact. A postmodern reading of the quartet shows that Native American authors and literary critics alike need not be afraid to tread into postmodernism, since an interpretation from this perspective opens up the possibility of freeing Native American literature from the limiting label of "ethnic or minority literature" and of establishing it as a vital part of American literature. This postmodern interpretation of Louise Erdrich's quartet offers a discussion of the theoretical issues involved in the context of ethnic writing and its relation to postmodernism, as well as an analysis of her intricate narrative strategies, in particular, her use of multiple perspectives and of intertextual techniques. The main part of the interpretation consists of a reading of postmodern concepts such as magical realism, carnivalesque humor, the relationship between reader and text, gender roles and sexual identities, history and textuality, the trickster figure, and games and chance as can be found in Louise Erdrich's North Dakota quartet.

This collection attends to western women's struggles within Roman Catholicism by examining how women throughout the centuries have attempted to reconcile their unruliness with their Catholic backgrounds or conversions.

"Brilliant. Smith shows us how to bridge and link authors into an understanding of contemporary American literature that occupies shared ground, yet she insists on the imperative of educating ourselves in many U.S. traditions. The result is a book that meets the extremely difficult challenge of working multiculturally without either erasing or overdetermining difference. This discussion will have applications well beyond the group of authors discussed here."--Elizabeth Ammons, coeditor of Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective "Transcultural and thoroughly documented, this study of contemporary ethnic texts by women is comparative in the most scholarly sense. No reader of modern American fiction could argue against its trickster premises: the power to laugh at old worlds, and invent new ones."--Kenneth Lincoln, author of Indi'n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America "Communicates keen insights on fictional techniques and cultural themes in clear, elegant and jargon-free language. I believe that this study will serve as an excellent model for future multicultural literary criticism."--Bonnie TuSmith, author of All My Relatives "Highly accessible to a diverse audience, Writing Tricksters forces readers to examine the power of storytelling traditions to cultural and individual survival. Smith's cross-cultural discussion of the trickster is right on the cusp of an important, evolving analytical direction."--Alanna Kathleen Brown, Montana State University "Few scholars have attempted to find the lines of contact and connection between ethnic writers. Writing Tricksters is fresh and original, an important addition to the growing corpus of truly multicultural critical texts."--Joseph Skerrett, coeditor of Memory, Narrative, and Identity

American literature is no longer the refuge of the solitary hero. Like the society it mirrors, it is now a far richer, many-faceted explication of a complicated and diverse society—racially, culturally, and ethnically interwoven and at the same time fractured and fractious. Ten women writing fiction in America today—Toni Cade Bambara, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Mary Lee Settle—represent that geographic, ethnic, and racial diversity that is distinctively American. Their differing perspectives on literature and the American experience have produced Erdrich's stolid North Dakota plainswomen; Didion's sun-baked dreamers and screamers; the urban ethnics—Irish, Jewish, and black—of Gordon, Schaeffer, and Bambara; Oates's small-town, often violent, neurotics; Lurie's intellectual sophisticates; and the southern survivors and victims, male and female, of Phillips, Settle, and Godwin. The ten original essays in this collection focus on the traditional themes of identity, memory, family, and enclosure that pervade the fiction of these writers. The fictional women who emerge here, as these critics show, are often caught in the interwoven strands of memory, perceive literal and emotional space as entrapping, find identity elusive and frustrating, and experience the interweaving of silence, solitude, and family in complex patterns. Each essay in this collection is followed by bibliographies of works by and about the writer in question that will be invaluable resources for scholars and general readers alike. Here is a readable critical discussion of ten important contemporary novelists who have broadened the pages of American literature to reflect more clearly the people we are.

James Nagel offers the first systematic history and definition of the short-story cycle as exemplified in contemporary American fiction, bringing attention to the format's wide appeal among various ethnic groups. He examines in detail eight recent manifestations of the genre, all praised by critics while uniformly misidentified as novels. Nagel proposes that the short-story cycle, with its concentric as opposed to linear plot development possibilities, lends itself particularly well to exploring themes of ethnic assimilation, which mirror some of the major issues facing American society today.