First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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".

Beverly Clark provides a cultural criticism of the school story, drawing upon the work of Derrida, Foucult, Spivak, Garger, and Jameson, among others. This is a study of the cross-gendering of the school story and explores the intersections of gender and age. This book argues that children's literature should receive the same critical scrutiny as adult literature.

In 18th through 20th-century British and American literature, school stories always play out the power relationships between adult and child. They also play out gender relationships, especially when females are excluded, although most histories of the genre ignore the unusual novels that probe the gendering of school stories. When the occasional man wrote about girls schools-as Charles Lamb and H. G. Wells did-he sometimes empowered his female characters, granting them freedoms that he had experienced at school.
Women who wrote about boys' schools often gave unusual emphasis to families, and at times, revealed the contradictions in the schoolyard code against telling tales or presented competing versions of masculinity, such as the Christian gentleman versus the self-made man. Sometimes these middle-class white women projected their sense of estrangement onto working class and minority women. Sometimes they wrote school stories that were in dialog with other genres, as when Mrs. Henry Wood wrote a sensation story or, like Louisa May Alcott, they domesticated the boys school story, giving prominence to a female viewpoint.

The hit Broadway show of 1912; the lost film of 1919; Katharine Hepburn, as Jo, sliding down a banister in George Cukor's 1933 movie; Mark English's shimmering 1967 illustrations; Jo--this time played by Sutton Foster--belting "I'll be / astonishing" in the 2004 Broadway musical flop: these are only some of the markers of the afterlife of "Little Women."

Then there's the nineteenth-century child who wrote, "If you do not... make Laurie marry Beth, I will never read another of your books as long as I live." Not to mention Miss Manners, a "Little Women" devotee, who announced that the book taught her an important life lesson: "Although it's very nice to have two clean gloves, it's even more important to have a little ink on your fingers." In "The Afterlife of "Little Women,"" Beverly Lyon Clark, a leading authority on children's literature, explores these and other after-tremors, both popular and academic, as she maps the reception of Louisa May Alcott's timeless novel, first published in 1868.

Clark divides her discussion into four historical periods. The first covers the novel's publication and massive popularity in the late nineteenth century. In the second era--the first three decades of the twentieth century--the novel becomes a nostalgic icon of the domesticity of a previous century, while losing status among the literary and scholarly elite. In its mid-century afterlife (1930-1960), "Little Women" reaches a low in terms of its critical reputation but remains a well-known piece of Americana within popular culture. The book concludes with a long chapter on Little "Women"'s afterlife from the 1960s to the present--a period in which the reading of the book seems to decline, while scholarly attention expands dramatically and popular echoes continue to proliferate.

Drawing on letters and library records as well as reviews, plays, operas, film and television adaptations, spinoff novels, translations, Alcott biographies, and illustrations, Clark demonstrates how the novel resonates with both conservative family values and progressive feminist ones. She grounds her story in criticism of children's literature, book history, cultural studies, feminist criticism, and adaptation studies. Written in an accessible narrative style, "The Afterlife of "Little Women"" speaks to scholars, librarians, and devoted Alcott fans.

The popularity of the Harry Potter books among adults and the critical acclaim these young adult fantasies have received may seem like a novel literary phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, however, readers considered both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as works of literature equally for children and adults; only later was the former relegated to the category of "boys' books" while the latter, even as it was canonized, came frequently to be regarded as unsuitable for young readers. Adults -- women and men -- wept over Little Women. And America's most prestigious literary journals regularly reviewed books written for both children and their parents. This egalitarian approach to children's literature changed with the emergence of literary studies as a scholarly discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. Academics considered children's books an inferior literature and beneath serious consideration.

In Kiddie Lit, Beverly Lyon Clark explores the marginalization of children's literature in America -- and its recent possible reintegration -- both within the academy and by the mainstream critical establishment. Tracing the reception of works by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. Frank Baum, Walt Disney, and J. K. Rowling, Clark reveals fundamental shifts in the assessment of the literary worth of books beloved by both children and adults, whether written for boys or girls. While uncovering the institutional underpinnings of this transition, Clark also attributes it to changing American attitudes toward childhood itself, a cultural resistance to the intrinsic value of childhood expressed through sentimentality, condescension, andmoralizing.

Clark's engaging and enlightening study of the critical disregard for children's books since the end of the nineteenth century -- which draws on recent scholarship in gender, cultural, and literary studies -- offers provocative new insights into the history of both children's literature and American literature in general, and forcefully argues that the books our children read and love demand greater respect.

Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet bring together twenty-two scholars to look closely at the complexities of children's culture. "Girls, Boys, Books, Toys" asks questions about how the gender symbolism of children's culture is constructed and resisted. What happens when women rewrite (or illustrate) nursery rhymes, adventure stories, and fairy tales told by men? How do the socially scripted plots for boys and girls change through time and across cultures? Have critics been blind to what women write about "masculine" topics? Can animal tales or doll stories displace tired commonplaces about gender, race, and class? Can different critical approaches--new historicism, narratology, or postcolonialism--enable us to gain leverage on the different implications of gender, age, race, and class in our readings of children's books and children's culture?

Each of us has a narrative compass, a story that has guided our lifework. In this extraordinary collection, women scholars from a variety of disciplines identify and examine the stories that have inspired them, haunted them, and shaped their research, from "Little House on the Prairie" to "Little Women," from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" to Nancy Drew, "Mary Jane, " and even the Chinese memoir "Jottings from the Transcendant's Abode at Mt. Youtai." Telling the "story of her story" leads each of the essayists to insights about her own approach to studying narratives and to a deeper, often surprising, understanding of the power of imagination.

Contributors are Deyonne Bryant, Minjie Chen, Cindy L. Christiansen, Beverly Lyon Clark, Karen Coats, Wendy Doniger, Bonnie Glass-Coffin, Betsy Hearne, Joanna Hearne, Ann Hendricks, Rania Huntington, Christine Jenkins, Kimberly Lau, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Maria Tatar, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Roberta Seelinger Trites, Claudia Quintero Ulloa, and Ofelia Zepeda.

The history of children's literature is a growing area of study; this group of essays brings together innovative, scholarly voices to explore the fascinating tales behind many beloved books. The publication mines the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature, one of the world's richest sources for original books, manuscripts, and artwork. The essays, commissioned for this volume, examine little-known backstories of three hundred years of classic children's literature, from Louisa May Alcott to Langston Hughes to Mo Willems. Distributed for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library