Liang Chen

Hybridizing Identity: Louise Erdrich As Mixed-blood: a Postcolonial Study of the Novels of Louise Erdrich Liang Chen

Like many contemporary Native American writers, Louise Erdrich has created a hybrid of traditional story and novel closely connected to her literary sense of mixed-bloodedness,which constitues a fundamental characteristic of the contemporary Native American novel. Erdrich writes what we might term her works as "the mixed-blood narrative" in which, like mixed-blood culture,her texts occupy, in terms of subject matter and formal qualities, the margin between purely traditional Native American modes of representation and those modes common in European American culture. The present book distinguishes itself by the exploration of the literary experimentation of hybridization techniques adopted by Louise Erdrich. The four perspectives, i.e. narration, religion, myth and gender, are put forth to conduct a comparatively comprehensive study of hybridization techniques in Erdrich, which play different roles in the formation of Native literary and cultural identity and resistance of the dominant white discourse.