Reviewed by:

• Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond ed. by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips
• Cathryn Halverson

Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond is an engaging collection of fourteen essays contributed by scholars at all [End Page 393] stages of their careers. The book grew out of a roundtable at the 2015 meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) inspired by the publication of Wilder's memoir, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Editors Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips explain that rather than simply celebrating Wilder the group wanted to critically analyze her books and influence. Acknowledging that her racial views have made her a controversial writer, they argue for why we should continue to read and study her nonetheless.

Grouped into four sections—"Wilder and 'Truth,'" "Wilder and Constructions of Gender," "Wilder, Plains Studies, and the American Literature Canon," and "Cultural and Intercultural Wilder"—the book's many excellent essays complement each other without growing repetitive. Their diverse subjects include, among others, the antimodernist dimension of Wilder-related tourism (Anna Thompson Hajdik), Wilder's and Rose Wilder Lane's differing political views (Dawn Sardella-Ayres), Wilder's perspective on rural women's education (Jericho Williams), and Wilder's use of horses to imagine "Anglo-Indian Womanhood" (Vera R. Foley). Examining Laura's "two terrible mistakes" in respect to both Indians and the "abundant nonhuman world" around her (192), Margaret Noodin's "A Little Place in the Universe: An Ojibwe, Osage, and Dakota View of Laura Ingalls" is a highlight.

Full of precisely expressed readings, the book offers many fresh insights: that Little House on the Prairie can be read as a captivity narrative, with Charles Ingalls the terrifying captor (Christine E. Farnan); that Laura's infamous desire to possess a black-eyed Indian baby builds on her attachment to her button-eyed rag doll (Jenna Brack); that the historical record upholds the fictional portrayal of the Wilders' equitable marriage (Melanie J. Fishbane); that Laura's fate in becoming a white mother is to acquire an aversion to Indians (Sonya Sawyer Fritz); that the "ceaseless acts of repetition" generated by the series are the source of its "semblance of truth" (Katharine Slater, 3).

One might expect a book on this topic to include several scholars who specialize in western studies or at least make reference to established, influential works in the field. That expectation, [End Page 394] however, is not fulfilled, and as a consequence the collection lacks essays that deliberately situate Wilder within regional literary traditions while engaging with the existing scholarship to theorize her work. Even Annette Kolodny's classic The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers and Amy Kaplan's essential "Manifest Domesticity" are not invoked, nor is Nina Baym's more recent, quantitative Women Writers of the American West. Ann Romines's Constructing the Little House and Frances W. Kaye's "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve" are critical touchstones throughout the volume, but a study like Linda Karell's Writing Together/Writing Apart: Collaboration in Western American Literature would have provided specific regional insight into the Wilder and Lane partnership that interests so many of these scholars, as would Christine Bold on gender and western cultural production, Susan Rosowski and Brigitte Georgi-Findlay on women's frontier narratives, Krista Comer on landscape, Victoria Lamont on Westerns, and many others that readers of this journal are surely familiar with.

While the editors maintain that the relative critical neglect of Wilder is "emblematic of the way critics have historically dismissed many commercially successful women writers" (xv), it is also symptomatic of the widespread tendency to read and write about western women writers in isolation from each other, which in turn reflects the marginalization of western studies at large. Lamont's review essay in Legacy (SSAWW's home journal), "Big Books Wanted: Women and Western American Literature in the Twenty-First Century," explores the cluster of factors that have led...

审核人：

• 重新考虑Laura Ingalls Wilder：《 Little House and Beyond ed》。米兰达·格林·巴特（Miranda A.Green-Barteet）和安妮·菲利普斯（Anne K.Phillips）
• 凯瑟琳·哈弗森（Cathryn Halverson）

重新考虑劳拉·英格尔斯·怀尔德（Laura Ingalls Wilder）：《小房子与超越》是一本引人入胜的论文集，由14篇论文组成，这些论文是学者在其职业生涯的所有[End Page 393]阶段撰写的。这本书是在2015年美国女性作家研究协会（SSAWW）会议的一次圆桌会议上发表的，该会议的灵感来自怀尔德的回忆录《先锋女孩：带注释的自传》的出版。编者米兰达·格林·巴特（Miranda A. 他们承认她的种族观点使她成为有争议的作家，因此他们争辩说为什么我们仍然应该继续阅读和研究她。

本书分为“ Wilder and'Truth”，“ Wilder和性别建构”，“ Wilder，平原研究和美国文学经典”和“文化和跨文化荒野”四个部分，该书的许多优秀论文互为补充没有重复。他们的主题多种多样，其中包括与怀尔德有关的旅游业的反现代主义维度（安娜·汤普森·哈伊迪克），怀尔德和罗斯怀尔德巷的不同政治观点（黎明·萨德拉·艾尔斯），怀尔德对农村妇女教育的看法（杰里乔·威廉姆斯）和怀尔德的用马来想象“印度裔印度女人”（Vera R. Foley）。研究劳拉（Laura）在印第安人和周围的“丰富的非人类世界”方面的“两个可怕的错误”（192），

这本书充满了精确表达的读物，提供了许多新鲜的见解：大草原上的小房子可以被当作囚禁的叙述，查尔斯·英加尔斯（Charles Ingalls）是令人恐怖的俘虏（克里斯汀·法南（Christine E. Farnan）；劳拉（Laura）臭名昭著的渴望拥有一个黑眼睛的印度婴儿，是建立在她对纽扣眼睛布娃娃（Jenna Brack）的依恋之上的；该历史记录秉承了荒野人的公平婚姻的虚构写照（Melanie J. Fishbane）；劳拉成为白人母亲的命运是对印第安人的厌恶（Sonya Sawyer Fritz）；该系列产生的“无休止的重复行为”是其“真相”的来源（Katharine Slater，3）。

可能会有人希望找到有关该主题的书，其中包括几位专门研究西方研究的学者，或者至少参考了该领域已建立的，有影响力的著作。但是，[End Page 394]的期望未能实现，因此，该系列缺乏散文，这些散文故意将Wilder置于地区文学传统中，同时又与现有的学术研究联系起来，以对她的作品进行理论化。甚至连安妮特·科洛妮（Annette Kolodny）的经典著作《她面前的土地：美国边疆的幻想和经历》，以及艾米·卡普兰（Amy Kaplan）的基本“清单居住性”都没有被引用，尼娜·贝姆（Nina Baym）的最新，定量的《美国西部女作家》也没有被引用。安·罗米斯（Ann Romines）的“建造小房子”和弗朗西斯·W·凯（Frances W. Kaye）的《 Osage储量减少的小Squ屋》是整本书的重要试金石，但像Linda Karell的《一起写作/分开写作：美国西部文学的合作》这样的研究将为Wilder和Lane合作伙伴关系提供特定的地区见解。这些学者非常感兴趣，克里斯蒂娜·布尔德（Christine Bold）的性别和西方文化生产，苏珊·罗索夫斯基（Susan Rosowski）和布里吉特·乔治·芬德莱（Brigitte Georgi-Findlay）的妇女前沿叙事，克里斯蒂娜·科默（Krista Comer）的风景学，维多利亚·拉蒙特（Western）的文学以及其他许多读者对此都很感兴趣。一定很熟悉。

尽管编辑们认为，对怀尔德的相对批判性忽视是“对历史上批评家解雇许多商业上成功的女作家的方式的刻板印象”（xv），但它也表明了阅读和写作的普遍趋势是孤立于西方女性作家的。彼此之间，这反过来反映了整个西方研究的边缘化。Lamont在Legacy（SSAWW的家庭杂志）上发表的评论文章“通缉大书：二十一世纪的女性与西美国文学”探讨了导致...