Louisa May Alcott and the Textual Child

This book examines constructions of childhood in the works of Louisa May Alcott. While Little Women continues to gain popular and critical attention, Alcott's wider works for children have largely been consigned to history. This book therefore investigates Alcott's lesser-known children's texts to reconsider critical assumptions about childhood in her works and in literature more widely. Kristina West investigates the trend towards reading Alcott's life into her works; readings of gender and sexuality, race, disability, and class; the sentimental domestic; portrayals of Transcendentalism and American education; and adaptations of these works. Analyzing Alcott as a writer for twenty-first-century children, West considers Alcott's place in the children's canon and how new media and fan fiction impact readings of her works today.

Calls on theoretical approaches to childhood to offer an alternative to the biographical readings of Little Women Draws on juvenilia and Alcott family letters and journals--including previously unpublished archival material Analyses texts that have been overlooked or otherwise sidelined in the recent critical focus on Alcott's other works

Autorentext

Kristina West completed her PhD on constructions of childhood in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and is an affiliated member of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media at the University of Reading. Her research focuses on American literature, children's literature, and critical theory. She will soon publish her next book, Reading the Salem Witch Child.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Reading Alcott's Textual Childhood.- Chapter 2: 'We really lived most of it': The Trouble with Autobiography.- Chapter 3: Subverting the Sentimental Domestic.- Chapter 4: Queering the Child.- Chapter 5: Race, Disability, and Class: Alcott's Peripheral Children.- Chapter 6: A Transcendental Childhood.- Chapter 7: 'The model children': Alcott's Theories of Education.- Chapter 8: Retelling Alcott in the 21st Century.