Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is one of the most critically and commercially successful Native American writers, securing prestigious awards and an international readership with her debut novel, Love Medicine. This book is the first fully comprehensive treatment of Louise Erdrich's writing, analysing the textual complexities and diverse contexts of her work to date. Drawing on, and taking to task, the critical archive relating to Erdrich's work and to Native American literature more broadly, Stirrup explores the full depth and range of her authorship, charting common themes in her writing and interrogating positive and negative critical responses alike. Breaking Erdrich's oeuvre down into several groupings - the poetry, early and late fiction, memoir and children's writing - Stirrup develops individual readings of both the critical arguments and the texts themselves, demonstrating a number of comparative threads that cut across boundaries. Alongside nuanced readings, this book argues that Erdrich's work has developed an increasing political acuity and alertness to the profound relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Native American literatures. Ultimately, Erdrich's insistence on being read as an American writer is shown - in her own terms - to be in constant and mutually-inflecting dialogue with her Ojibwe heritage; resulting in work that is powerful, richly textured, and above all an engaged reflection on questions of influence in all its forms, community, sovereignty, history, and writing itself. Both synthesizing received wisdom, and offering numerous original readings of its own, this sophisticated analysis is of use to students and readers at all levels of engagement with Erdrich's writing.