The 30th volume in the Children's Literature series of annual publications. It features reviews such as: Alcott Reading; Little House on a Big Quilt; and Identity Crises. It also contains essays on topics such as: Power, Fear, and Children's Picture Books; and Affirmative Acts.

Children's Literature: Volume 30

Literature & Fiction

Pfeiffer, Julie

Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Louisa May Alcotts Little Women belongs both to the family story genre of childrens literature and the domestic or sentimental novel genre of the 19th century. This study considers the book not only as a family story but as a family romance, a romanticized interpretation of Alcotts own family life.

Little Women, A Family Romance (Masterwork Studies Series)

Twayne Publishers

It is no secret that Louisa May Alcott “rewrote” not only herself but also her mother, father, and sisters in Little Women. Yet how well do we grasp the significance of her impulse? Little Women: A Family Romance focuses on Alcott’s personal and creative motivations in fashioning an idealized family in her novel and gives us new ways to view both the fictional Marches and the real-world Alcotts.Drawing on Freud’s essay “Family Romances” and his related work on children’s daydreams and fantasies, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser reads Little Women in terms of the burgeoning hostility and longing, eroticism and ambition each March child experiences as she matures and begins to look beyond her parents for a new primary love. Keyser also reads Little Women in the context of the torrid, sensational stories aimed at lower-class readers (which Alcott also wrote) that we commonly equate with the term “romance,” as well as the sophisticated psychological romantic ideals associated with the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (whom Alcott knew and read).Readers have long regarded Little Women as Jo March’s story. The insights offered here nudge us toward viewing the novel as the story of the entire March family, a more satisfyingly inclusive view for, as Keyser writes, “the relationships among the March sisters and their mother are more compelling than the development of any one character, not excluding Jo.”

Little Women: A Family Romance

University of Georgia Press

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