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Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

American Literature

2022

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese Dec 2022

Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Utilizing a girls’ studies perspective and materialist feminist lens, this paper seeks to put Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) in conversation with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). Besides being published in the early 1940s, both works feature young girls navigating class struggles, exploring their identities, and struggling against dominant ideologies specific to their time and place. McCullers’ and Smith’s novels depict how a patriarchal, capitalist society imposes upon young women a narrow, misogynistic view of themselves and the women around them—facilitating the social reproduction of oppression and alienation. In depicting these realities of …

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Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva Apr 2022

Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva

Student Research Submissions

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels, share a place in the canon of American children’s literature as novels centered on female protagonists coming of age within an emblematic period in American history, respectively the duration and aftermath of the Civil War and the post-Homestead Act settlement of the Western frontier. Each text portrays the intertwined processes of girlhood and nationhood through the eyes of rebellious, gender-nonconforming protagonists, Jo and Laura, who each undergo an arc towards starting a traditional family and immersing themselves in normative national projects (respectively a philanthropic school for the poor, …

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