Little House On The Prairie (Masterwork Studies Series) - Hardcover

Ingalls, Laura

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805788204 ISBN 13: 9780805788204

Publisher: Twayne Publishers, 1996

Synopsis

Series Editor: Robert Lecker, McGill University.Written in an easy-to-read, accessible style by teachers with years of classroom experience, MASTERWORK STUDIES are guides to the literary works most frequently studied in high school. Presenting ideas that spark imaginations, these books help students to gain background knowledge on great literature useful for papers and exams. The goal of each study is to encourage creative thinking by presenting engaging information about each work and its author. This approach allows students to arrive at sound analyses of their own, based on in-depth studies of popular literature. Each volume: illuminates themes and concepts of a classic text; uses clear, conversational language; is an accessible, manageable length from 140 to 170 pages; includes a chronology of the authors life and era; provides an overview of the historical context; offers a summary of its critical reception; and lists primary and secondary sources and index.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Speaking at a book fair in 1937, the beloved children's writer Laura Ingalls Wilder remarked, "I realized that I had seen and lived it all - all the successive phases of the frontier.... Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history". To preserve that history for children, Wilder created the Little House series of books, an eight-volume undertaking she began at age sixty-two. These autobiographical novels are about growing up on the American frontier in the middle 1800s; they center on the character Laura and her parents - Pa and Ma - and treat of home, farm, family, land, and community. Classics of children's literature, the Little House books originally received five nominations as Newbery Honor Books; were reissued in editions illustrated by Garth Williams in the early 1950s; and formed the basis for the popular television series Little House on the Prairie in 1974. The third novel in the series, Little House on the Prairie (1935), takes place in the Indian Territory of Kansas. In this book Laura becomes a frontier girl; and throughout the twenty-six chapters the focus is on the land: the prairie as it was experienced by those who homesteaded there. In this novel, as in the other books in the series, Wilder weaves a tapestry of joy and serenity, acknowledging the realities of pain and loss but allowing the values of the Ingalls family - caring and peace - to predominate over adversity. In Little House on the Prairie: A Reader's Companion, the scholar Virginia L. Wolf presents a multifaceted perspective on the novel, the series, and Wilder's place in children's literature. Arguing that the myth of the American frontier lies in the seeminglycontradictory notion that the wilderness is to be at once conquered and revered, Wolf offers a probing inquiry into the many contexts in which Wilder's achievements can be understood. Here readers will find discussions of the ambivalence and ambiguity central to both novel and myth; comparisons with the television show and with the other books in the series; insights into the complex relationship between Wilder and her daughter, who not only edited the novels but also drew on them in her own writing; and analysis of the critical reactions to Little House on the Prairie. Of special interest are the chapter suggesting ways to teach students to read the novel and the selected bibliography outlining primary, secondary, and biographical sources.

About this edition

• Publisher: Twayne Publishers
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0805788204
• ISBN 13: 9780805788204
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 186