Contributions by Emily Anderson, Elif S. Armbruster, Jenna Brack,
Christine Cooper-Rompato, Christiane E. Farnan, Melanie J. Fishbane,
Vera R. Foley, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Anna
Thompson Hajdik, Keri Holt, Shosuke Kinugawa, Margaret Noodin, Anne K.
Phillips, Dawn Sardella-Ayres, Katharine Slater, Lindsay Stephens, and
Jericho Williams
Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond offers a
sustained, critical examination of Wilder's writings, including her
Little House series, her posthumously published and unrevised The First
Four Years, her letters, her journalism, and her autobiography, Pioneer
Girl. The collection also draws on biographies of Wilder, letters to and
from Wilder and her daughter, collaborator and editor Rose Wilder Lane,
and other biographical materials. Contributors analyze the current state
of Wilder studies, delineating Wilder's place in a canon of increasingly
diverse US women writers, and attending in particular to issues of
gender, femininity, space and place, truth, and collaboration, among
other issues.
The collection argues that Wilder's work and her contributions to US
children's literature, western literature, and the pioneer experience
must be considered in context with problematic racialized
representations of peoples of color, specifically Native Americans.
While Wilder's fiction accurately represents the experiences of white
settlers, it also privileges their experiences and validates, explicitly
and implicitly, the erasure of Native American peoples and culture. The
volume's contributors engage critically with Wilder's writings,
interrogating them, acknowledging their limitations, and enhancing
ongoing conversations about them while placing them in context with
other voices, works, and perspectives that can bring into focus larger
truths about North American history. Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder
examines Wilder's strengths and weaknesses as it discusses her writings
with context, awareness, and nuance.
