Love Medicine: Conflicts And Synergies Between American Indian Culture And White Culture

In the 1960s and 1970s, multiracial awareness grew among the various ethnic groups of America, one of which is American Indians. Therefore, American culture and literature have been forming a diversified feature. As a new force of American literature, American Indian literature rises.Louise Erdrich, a well-known and productive woman writer of contemporary American Indian literature, is acclaimed by numerous readers and critics for her marvelous description on the life of the North Dakota Indians, playing an irreplaceable role in American literature. Her first novel, Love Medicine, was first published in 1984 and won a number of awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award for best work of fiction. With the story "The World's Greatest Fisherman" which would become the first chapter of Love Medicine, Erdrich won The Nelson Algren fiction competition in 1982. As its title suggests, Love Medicine is centered in the relationships between lovers and families. However, its significance is more profound than that since it reflects the conflicts and synergies between Indian's traditions and contemporary American society and culture. The novel features the diversified image of American culture and literature from its unique perspective.This thesis intends to focus on Love Medicine based on the theory of post-colonialism and to provide the observation and understanding of a Chinese reader. Introduction introduces research background and purpose and macroscopically depicts the backgrounds of the development of contemporary American Indian literature, introducing its process. Besides, I summarize the literature review of...