Louisa May Alcott and the Textual Child: A Critical Theory Approach

by Kristina West

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030390273
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	04/29/2020
Series:	Critical Approaches to Children's Literature
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Since the end of the nineteenth century, Louisa May Alcott has been called ‘the children’s friend’. Besides Little Women, however, little scholarly attention has been devoted to her works for children. Louisa May Alcott and the Textual Child fills that gap by examining Alcott’s construction of childhood in Little Women and many other works for and about children. Drawing upon the most contemporary scholarship, Kristina West, in this superbly researched study, explores how Alcott, and her readers, construct childhood. Louisa May Alcott and the Textual Child, without a doubt, is an important contribution to Alcott scholarship and to the discussion of childhood in general.” (Daniel Shealy, Professor of English, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, USA)

“This engaging and timely study reminds us that the impact of Alcott’s writings for children—on her era, on children's literature, and on cultural images of the child—was much larger than that of her most famous novel, Little Women. With careful attention to issues such as education, race, gender, sexuality, poverty, and disability, West's revelatory readings take us well beyond Alcott's own often-quoted dismissal of her children's writing as ‘moral pap for the young.’” (Anne Boyd Rioux, Professor of English, University of New Orleans, USA, and author of Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (2018))

“Of interest to Alcott aficionados, childhood studies scholars, students of Transcendentalism, and others, Louisa May Alcott and the Textual Child traces representations of the child across an array of Alcott’s writings for young audiences. West delineates the slipperiness of Alcott’s language in her autobiographical writings and fiction, troubling conventional readings of her life and works while offering nuanced analysis.” (Anne K. Phillips, Professor of English, Kansas State University, USA)