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

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.

Introduction, Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark * Meg, Amy, Beth, Jo, and Marmee Face Life in the '80s, Victoria Roberts * Waiting Together: (Alcott on Matriarchy), Nina Auerbach * Alcotts' Civil War, Judith Fetterley * Introduction to Little Women, Ann Douglas * Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March, Catharine R. Stimpson * The Most Beautiful Things in All the World? Families in Little Women, Elizabeth Lennox Kayser * Portraying Little Women Through the Ages, Anne Hollander * Getting Cozy with a Classic: Visualizing Little Women, Susan R. Gannon * Queer Performances: Lesbian Politics, Roberta Seelinger Trites * Notes of a Resisting (Male) Reader, Jan Susina * In Jo's Garrett: The Space of Imagination, Sue Standing * A Power in the House: The Architecture of Individual Expression, David Watters * Prophets and Martyrs: Pilgrims and Missionaries, in Little Women and Jack and Jill, Anne K. Phillips * Searching for Feminist Utopia, Kathryn Manson Tomasek * Transatlantic Translations: Communities of Education in Alcott and Bronte, Christine Doyle Francis * Alcott's Response to Girls' Miseducation, Susan Laird * Rereading and Rewriting Alcott, Janice M. Alberghene * Songs to Aging Children: Alcott's March Trilogy, Michelle Masse * Alcott in Japan: A Selected Bibliography, Aiko Moro-oka * Selected Bibliography of Alcott Biography and Criticism, Beverly Lyon Clark and Linnea Hendrickson

Janice M. Alberghene, Beverly Lyon Clark