LITTLE WOMEN and THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays

by Alberghene,Janice M.

• ISBN13: 9780815320494
• ISBN10: 0815320493
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-12-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

General Editor's Foreword	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	xv
Janice M. Alberghene
Beverly Lyon Clark
Cartoon---Little Women: Meg, Amy, Beth, Jo and Marmee Face Life in the '80s	3	(4)
Victoria Roberts
Waiting Together: Alcott on Matriarchy	7	(20)
Nina Auerbach
Little Women: Alcott's Civil War	27	(16)
Judith Fetterley
Introduction to Little Women	43	(20)
Ann Douglas
Reading For Love: Canons Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March	63	(20)
Catharine R. Stimpson
``The Most Beautiful Things in All the World''? Families in Little Women	83	(14)
Elizabeth Lennox Keyser
Portraying Little Women Through the Ages	97	(6)
Anne Hollander
Getting Cozy with a Classic: Visualizing Little Women (1868--1995)	103	(36)
Susan R. Gannon
``Queer Performances'': Lesbian Politics in Little Women	139	(22)
Roberta Seelinger Trites
Men and Little Women: Notes of a Resisting (Male) Reader	161	(12)
Jan Susina
In Jo's Garret: Little Women and the Space of Imagination	173	(12)
Sue Standing
``A power in the house'': Little Women and the Architecture of Individual Expression	185	(28)
David H. Watters
The Prophets and the Martyrs: Pilgrims and Missionaries in Little Women and Jack and Jill	213	(24)
Anne K. Phillips
A Greater Happiness: Searching for Feminist Utopia in Little Women	237	(24)
Kathryn Manson Tomasek
Transatlantic Translations: Communities of Education in Alcott and Bronte	261	(24)
Christine Doyle
Learning from Marmee's Teaching: Alcott's Response to Girls' Miseducation	285	(38)
Susan Laird
Songs to Aging Children: Louisa May Alcott's March Trilogy	323	(24)
Michelle A. Masse
Autobiography and the Boundaries of Interpretation: On Reading Little Women and the Living Is Easy	347	(30)
Janice M. Alberghene
Alcott in Japan: A Selected Bibliography	377	(4)
Aiko Moro-oka
Selected Bibliography of Alcott Biography and Criticism	381	(40)
Beverly Lyon Clark
Linnea Hendrickson
Contributors	421	(4)
Index	425