Beyond Little Women

Lauren Hehmeyer, M.A., M.I.S., is a retired professor from Texarkana College, USA. She is the co-editor of The Forgotten Alcott: Essays on the Artistic Legacy and Literary Life of May Alcott Nieriker (2022). She has presented papers on the Alcotts in Paris, France; Lancaster, England; and Concord, Massachusetts

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part 1   Re-defining the Gothic: The Sensational has a Modern Edge.- Chapter 2: The Sensational Possibilities of the Double-Proposal Plot in Alcott’s Moods.- Chapter 3: Reading the Monstrous Feminine in the Works of Louisa May Alcott.- Part 2 Re-Defining Woman’s Identity through Work.- Chapter 4: Louisa May Alcott’s Literary Activism: A Realist Reading of Hospital Sketches.- Chapter 5: Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience and the Heroine’s Educational.- Chapter 6: Louisa May Alcott’s Re-“Work”ing of Thoreau’s Walden.- Chapter 7: Circus, Gender, and Class Under the Lilacs.- Part 3 Re-defining Health and Strength.- Chapter 8: “Health Should Come First”: Alcott’s Model of Hygienic Female Development in Eight Cousins.- Chapter 9: “Cozy Corners” and “Pebbly Beaches”: Resolving Emotional Distress through Nature Connectedness in Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom and Jack and Jill. Chapter 10: “A Sweeter Poem Than Any They Could Write”: Female Mental Resilience and Genre Limitations in “A Whisper in the Dark” and A Modern Mephistopheles.- Part 4 Re-defining Creativity: A Challenge to Emersonian Ideas.- Chapter 11: Women in search of the Sublime: Louisa May Alcott and May Alcott Nieriker.- Chapter 12: Hospital Sketches and Celebrity Authorship in the Civil War Era.- Chapter 13: The Care and Feeding of Genius: Louisa May Alcott’s Jo’s Boys.