Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is arguably the most widely read 19th-century author in America. Even through the 1990s, her books continued to appear on bestseller lists and her works were made into films. She has long been a staple of children's literature courses and now also receives significant attention in American studies and women's studies classes. While her tremendous popularity has yielded numerous biographies and a growing number of critical works, very few reference books have been devoted to Alcott studies and none are particularly current or complete. This book collects in a comprehensive and reliable single volume the most important facts about Alcott's life and works. This reference surveys the basic biographical details about Alcott's family and personal life. It supplies essential information on her historical and cultural contexts, including her place in the 19th century publishing milieu, various reform movements, and major historical events, such as the Civil War. It also treats her writings, both the adult and children's works, in an accurate, informative, and accessible manner. The volume includes more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries. Each entry discusses the topic's relevance to Alcott's life and current scholarship about her. Many of the entries close with brief bibliographies, and the book concludes with a list of works for further reading.

"Backgrounds and Contexts" includes a wealth of archival materials, among them previously unpublished correspondence with Thomas Niles and Alcott's own precursors to Little Women. "Criticism" reprints twenty nineteenth-century reviews. Seven modern essays represent a variety of critical theories used to read and study the novel, including feminist (Catharine R. Stimpson, Elizabeth Keyser), new historicist (Richard H. Brodhead), psychoanalytic (Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant), and reader-response (Barbara Sicherman). A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Contributions by Emily Anderson, Elif S. Armbruster, Jenna Brack, Christine Cooper-Rompato, Christiane E. Farnan, Melanie J. Fishbane, Vera R. Foley, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Anna Thompson Hajdik, Keri Holt, Shosuke Kinugawa, Margaret Noodin, Anne K. Phillips, Dawn Sardella-Ayres, Katharine Slater, Lindsay Stephens, and Jericho Williams Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond offers a sustained, critical examination of Wilder's writings, including her Little House series, her posthumously published and unrevised The First Four Years, her letters, her journalism, and her autobiography, Pioneer Girl. The collection also draws on biographies of Wilder, letters to and from Wilder and her daughter, collaborator and editor Rose Wilder Lane, and other biographical materials. Contributors analyze the current state of Wilder studies, delineating Wilder's place in a canon of increasingly diverse US women writers, and attending in particular to issues of gender, femininity, space and place, truth, and collaboration, among other issues. The collection argues that Wilder's work and her contributions to US children's literature, western literature, and the pioneer experience must be considered in context with problematic racialized representations of peoples of color, specifically Native Americans. While Wilder's fiction accurately represents the experiences of white settlers, it also privileges their experiences and validates, explicitly and implicitly, the erasure of Native American peoples and culture. The volume's contributors engage critically with Wilder's writings, interrogating them, acknowledging their limitations, and enhancing ongoing conversations about them while placing them in context with other voices, works, and perspectives that can bring into focus larger truths about North American history. Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder examines Wilder's strengths and weaknesses as it discusses her writings with context, awareness, and nuance.

Contributions by Emily Anderson, Elif S. Armbruster, Jenna Brack, Christine Cooper-Rompato, Christiane E. Farnan, Melanie J. Fishbane, Vera R. Foley, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Anna Thompson Hajdik, Keri Holt, Shosuke Kinugawa, Margaret Noodin, Anne K. Phillips, Dawn Sardella-Ayres, Katharine Slater, Lindsay Stephens, and Jericho Williams Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond offers a sustained, critical examination of Wilder's writings, including her Little House series, her posthumously published and unrevised The First Four Years, her letters, her journalism, and her autobiography, Pioneer Girl. The collection also draws on biographies of Wilder, letters to and from Wilder and her daughter, collaborator and editor Rose Wilder Lane, and other biographical materials. Contributors analyze the current state of Wilder studies, delineating Wilder's place in a canon of increasingly diverse US women writers, and attending in particular to issues of gender, femininity, space and place, truth, and collaboration, among other issues. The collection argues that Wilder's work and her contributions to US children's literature, western literature, and the pioneer experience must be considered in context with problematic racialized representations of peoples of color, specifically Native Americans. While Wilder's fiction accurately represents the experiences of white settlers, it also privileges their experiences and validates, explicitly and implicitly, the erasure of Native American peoples and culture. The volume's contributors engage critically with Wilder's writings, interrogating them, acknowledging their limitations, and enhancing ongoing conversations about them while placing them in context with other voices, works, and perspectives that can bring into focus larger truths about North American history. Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder examines Wilder's strengths and weaknesses as it discusses her writings with context, awareness, and nuance.