Little Women at 150

Daniel Shealy

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781496837998
• eBook ISBN: 9781496838025
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Beverly Lyon Clark, Christine Doyle, Gregory Eiselein, John Matteson, Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Anne K. Phillips, Daniel Shealy, and Roberta Seelinger Trites As the golden age of children's literature dawned in America in the mid-1860s, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a work that many scholars view as one of the first realistic novels for young people, soon became a classic. Never out of print, Alcott's tale of four sisters growing up in nineteenth-century New England has been published in more than fifty countries around the world. Over the century and a half since its publication, the novel has grown into a cherished book for girls and boys alike. Readers as diverse as Carson McCullers, Gloria Steinem, Theodore Roosevelt, Patti Smith, and J. K. Rowling have declared it a favorite. Little Women at 150, a collection of eight original essays by scholars whose research and writings over the past twenty years have helped elevate Alcott's reputation in the academic community, examines anew the enduring popularity of the novel and explores the myriad complexities of Alcott's most famous work. Examining key issues about philanthropy, class, feminism, Marxism, Transcendentalism, canon formation, domestic labor, marriage, and Australian literature, Little Women at 150 presents new perspectives on one of the United States' most enduring novels. A historical and critical introduction discusses the creation and publication of the novel, briefly traces the scholarly critical response, and demonstrates how these new essays show us that Little Women and its illustrations still have riches to reveal to its readers in the twenty-first century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• LITTLE WOMEN AT 150
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Class, Charity, and Coming of Age in Little Women
• Louisa May Alcott’s Emersonian Use of The Pilgrim’s Progress: Little Women as Palimpsest
• “Faithfulness Itself ”: The Imperative for Hannah Mullet in Little Women
• Mobilizing the Little Women: Images of Transport and the Domestic
• “This Was Something Altogether New”: On Jo March’s Adulthood and Little Women’s Final Chapters
• Marriage in the Nineteenth Century: The Influence of Margaret Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit” on Little Women
• Louisa May Alcott, Ethel Turner, and Some Little Women Down Under
• Louisa May Alcott, Major Author: Little Women and Beyond
• About the Contributors