Little House on the Prairie participates in a nationalist project by reframing the pioneer local as coveted and critical to the construction of US empire. Writing in the tradition of Great Plains regional literature, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane ground this novel's deep nostalgia in an aesthetics of homemaking, encouraging young readers to mourn for a vanished past through their carefully crafted lexicon of desire and intimacy. The building of the little house itself is a production of snugness made possible by the theft of Osage lands. Ultimately, Prairie creates a close, comforting local space in which getting and having become the inevitable results of appropriative longing.

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