UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

Book Jacket: Constructing the Little House by A. Romines

Ann Romines

Winner of the Children's Literature Association Prize

The Little House series as a window on American culture

With more than thirty-five million copies in print, the Little House series, written in the 1930s and 1940s by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, has been a spectacular commercial success. What is it about this eight-volume serial novel for children that accounts for its enduring power? And what does the popularity of these books tell us about the currents of American culture?

Ann Romines interweaves personal observation with scholarly analysis to address these questions. Writing from a feminist perspective and drawing on the resources of gender studies, cultural studies, and new historicist reading, she examines both the content of the novels and the process of their creation. She explores the relationship between mother and daughter working as collaborative authors and calls into question our assumptions about plot, juvenile fiction, and constructions of gender on the nineteenth-century frontier and in the Depression years when the Little House books were written.

This is a book that will appeal both to scholars and to general readers who might welcome an engaging and accessible companion volume to the Little House novels.

"Romines has achieved an extraordinary tone in this book. On the one hand, it is framed by passages that are unashamedly autobiographical. On the other, it is decidedly a work of contemporary literary scholarship, a reading of an extremely popular set of children's books by an English professor versed in the latest work in her field. . . . I read it with much pleasure and learned a great deal from it."

Susan Strasser, author of Never Done: A History of American Housework
"Sets a new standard for studies of Wilder, of children's literature, of nineteenth-century women's popular literature, and of women's roles in the nineteenth century, especially on the American frontier, and affirms Romines's important place as a critic of all these concerns. . . . Readers have been waiting for this work—- even if they didn't know Romines was working on it."

Diane Quantic, author of The Nature of the Place:
A Study of Great Plains Fiction

Ann Romines is associate professor of and director of graduate studies in English at George Washington University.

Cultural Studies / American Studies / Children's Literature
304 pp., 9 illustrations
LC 97-14675
$55.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-121-X
$24.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-122-8
1997
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