Jack David Zipes

Beverly Lyon Clark

Janice M. Alberghene

Raising key questions about race, class, sexuality, age, material culture, intellectual history, pedagogy, and gender, this book explores the myriad relationships between feminist thinking and Little Women, a novel that has touched many women's lives. A critical introduction traces 130 years of popular and critical response, and the collection presents 11 new essays, two new bibliographies, and reprints of six classic essays. The contributors examine the history of illustrating Little Women; Alcott's use of domestic architecture as codes of female self-expression; the tradition of utopian writing by women; relationship to works by British and African American writers; recent thinking about feminist pedagogy; the significance of the novel for women writers, and its implications from the vantage points of middle-aged scholar, parent, and resisting male reader.

Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays

Little Women and the Feminist Imagination

Melvin J. Friedman

Each volume in this series provides an introduction tracing the subject author's critical reputation, trends in interpretation, developments in textual and biographical scholarship, and reprints of selected essays and reviews, beginning with the author's contemporaries and continuing through to current scholarship. Many volumes also feature new essays by leading scholars and critics, specially commissioned for the series.

Critical Essays on Carson McCullers

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys

Regendering the School Story

Honor Book for the 2005 Book Award given by the Children's Literature Association The popularity of the Harry Potter books among adults and the critical acclaim these young adult fantasies have received may seem like a novel literary phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, however, readers considered both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as works of literature equally for children and adults; only later was the former relegated to the category of "boys' books" while the latter, even as it was canonized, came frequently to be regarded as unsuitable for young readers. Adults—women and men—wept over Little Women. And America's most prestigious literary journals regularly reviewed books written for both children and their parents. This egalitarian approach to children's literature changed with the emergence of literary studies as a scholarly discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. Academics considered children's books an inferior literature and beneath serious consideration. In Kiddie Lit, Beverly Lyon Clark explores the marginalization of children's literature in America—and its recent possible reintegration—both within the academy and by the mainstream critical establishment. Tracing the reception of works by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. Frank Baum, Walt Disney, and J. K. Rowling, Clark reveals fundamental shifts in the assessment of the literary worth of books beloved by both children and adults, whether written for boys or girls. While uncovering the institutional underpinnings of this transition, Clark also attributes it to changing American attitudes toward childhood itself, a cultural resistance to the intrinsic value of childhood expressed through sentimentality, condescension, and moralizing. Clark's engaging and enlightening study of the critical disregard for children's books since the end of the nineteenth century—which draws on recent scholarship in gender, cultural, and literary studies— offers provocative new insights into the history of both children's literature and American literature in general, and forcefully argues that the books our children read and love demand greater respect.

The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America

Kiddie Lit

Margaret R. Higonnet

No previous collection of criticism has focused on gender in the broad range of children's literature. No previous collection has embraced both children's literature and material culture. Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet bring together twenty-two scholars to look closely at the complexities of children's culture. Girls, Boys, Books, Toys asks questions about how the gender symbolism of children's culture is constructed and resisted. What happens when women rewrite (or illustrate) nursery rhymes, adventure stories, and fairy tales told by men? How do the socially scripted plots for boys and girls change through time and across cultures? Have critics been blind to what women write about "masculine" topics? Can animal tales or doll stories displace tired commonplaces about gender, race, and class? Can different critical approaches—new historicism, narratology, or postcolonialism—enable us to gain leverage on the different implications of gender, age, race, and class in our readings of children's books and children's culture?

Gender in Children's Literature and Culture

Girls, Boys, Books, Toys

This volume contains include twenty-eight reviews and critical essays related to American writer and essayist Flannery O'Connor's (1925-1964) life and work. The collection begins with an introduction, which survey's O'Connor's career and the critical reaction to it, the remaining selections are arranged into three sections -- the first, offers twelve reviews dealing with O'Connor's two novels, and her collections of short stories and essays; the second section provides "tributes and reminiscences"; and, the third section includes a chronological record of the critical response to the writing, with positive as well as negative soundings are acknowledged.

Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor

Written in an accessible narrative style, The Afterlife of Little Women speaks to scholars, librarians, and devoted Alcott fans.

The Afterlife of "Little Women"

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

LITTLE WOMEN and THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION

This collection of nineteenth-century reviews provides a wealth of information for scholars interested in Alcott (increasing the number of indexed reviews almost tenfold) but also insight into the ways in which reading audiences were constructed in the nineteenth-century United States. The reviews provide a window on to nineteenth-century attitudes toward popular fiction and toward women writers. The author of the novels and of sensational tales, of travel writing and of temperance tracts, Alcott was both highly popular and highly respected. Her works were reviewed not just in magazines for children, but also in the most prestigious literary journals of the day.

The Contemporary Reviews

Louisa May Alcott

In Victorian England non-realistic fiction was largely forced underground, with Alice, into such marginal fiction as fantasy for children. Only now is fantasy beginning to receive the attention it deserves, in both fiction and literary criticism. Beverly Lyon Clark's Reflections of Fantasy extends recent theoretical work on fantasy by exploring the technique of the mirror-world. Tracing the fantasy mirror-world in Carroll, Nabokov, and Pynchon allows Clark to shed light on the dialectic central to fantasy, that between the real and the not-real, and also on Victorian and contemporary views of fictional reality, on the use of metaphoric and metonymic modes, on the ramifications of self-consciousness. She explores these themes in analyses of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Anya v stranye chudes, Pale Fire, Ada, and The Crying of Lot 49.

The Mirror-worlds of Carroll, Nabokov, and Pynchon

Reflections of Fantasy

“Superb, scrupulously researched . . . a comprehensive narrative for understanding the changing reception of Little Women.” —Gregory Eiselein, coeditor of The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia The hit Broadway show of 1912. The lost film of 1919. Katharine Hepburn, as Jo, sliding down a banister in George Cukor’s 1933 movie. Mark English’s shimmering 1967 illustrations. Jo—this time played by Sutton Foster—belting “I'll be / astonishing” in the 2004 Broadway musical flop. These are only some of the markers of the afterlife of Little Women. There’s also the nineteenth-century child who wrote, “If you do not ...make Laurie marry Beth, I will never read another of your books as long as I live.” Not to mention Miss Manners, a Little Women devotee, who announced that the book taught her an important life lesson: “Although it’s very nice to have two clean gloves, it’s even more important to have a little ink on your fingers.” In The Afterlife of Little Women, Beverly Lyon Clark, a leading authority on children’s literature, maps the reception of Louisa May Alcott’s timeless novel, first published in 1868. Clark divides her discussion into four historical periods. The first covers the novel’s publication and massive popularity in the late nineteenth century. In the second era—the first three decades of the twentieth century—the novel becomes a nostalgic icon of the domesticity of a previous century, while losing status among the literary and scholarly elite. In its mid-century afterlife, from 1930-1960, Little Women reaches a low in terms of its critical reputation but remains a well-known piece of Americana within popular culture. The book concludes with a long chapter on Little Women’s afterlife from the 1960s to the present, a period in which the reading of the book seems to decline, while scholarly attention expands dramatically and popular echoes continue to proliferate. Drawing on letters and library records as well as reviews, plays, operas, film and television adaptations, spinoff novels, translations, Alcott biographies, and illustrations, Clark demonstrates how the novel resonates with both conservative family values and progressive feminist ones. She grounds her story in criticism of children’s literature, book history, cultural studies, feminist criticism, and adaptation studies—in a book that is “fascinating, cover-to-cover, for the many readers of Little Women still out there, whether scholar or generally interested fan” (Studies in the Novel).

Beverly Lyon Clark

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