Louisa May Alcott and the Textual Child (eBook)

Acknowledgments 7
Contents 8
Chapter 1: Reading Alcott’s Textual Childhood 9
Childhood and Literature 9
The Little Women Legacy 13
Writing an American Childhood 15
Alcott and the Canon 21
‘Childhood Persists’ 24
The Chapters 27
Chapter 2: ‘We Really Lived Most of It’: The Trouble with Autobiography 33
Genre Trouble 33
Women Writing 35
The Trouble with ‘I’ 38
Retrieving the Real 40
Alcott and the Archives 46
Real Child, Real Author: Jo, Peter, Alice 50
Negotiating the ‘Counter-Flow’ 53
Chapter 3: Subverting the Sentimental Domestic 59
Positioning the Textual Child 59
‘There’s No Place Like Home’: Locating a Sentimental Childhood 61
Subverting the Domestic 67
Reconstructing the Family Unit 71
Changing Spaces 75
Fleeing the Domestic: Outside Spaces and Wild Children 78
Chapter 4: Queering the Child 86
Narrating the Queer Child 86
Queering Language 88
Child Sexuality 93
Queering the Family: Gender and Domestic Roles 97
Gender Performativity and the Cross-Dressing Child 104
Can Childhood Be Queer? 108
Chapter 5: Race, Disability, and Class: Alcott’s Peripheral Children 111
Reading Alcott’s Peripheral Children 111
‘Poor Lads’ and ‘Brave Little Girls’: Class and Poverty in Alcott 114
Reading the Disabled Child 121
Language and Race 130
Language and the Utopian Society 140
Chapter 6: A Transcendental Childhood 145
Reading Transcendentalism 145
A Transcendental Childhood 148
The Trouble with Utopia 150
‘This Large-Hearted Child’: Emerson, Thoreau, and Childhood26 157
A Textual Transcendentalism 164
Chapter 7: ‘The Model Children’: Alcott’s Theories of Education 167
A Transcendental Education 167
A Place to Learn 173
Books and Education: Reading the Canon 176
A Mutual Education 183
The Educated Child 186
Chapter 8: Retelling Alcott in the Twenty-First Century 192
Reading Fan Fiction 192
The Value of Fan Fiction 194
Children’s Literature and Fan Fiction 198
Little Women as Origin 199
Alcott Adaptations 203
Reading Alcott Fan Fiction 206
‘Everything Was Finally Right with the World’ 213
Bibliography 217
Index 225