CALL FOR PAPERS: Louisa May Alcott Society

American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco, CA, May 24-27, 2018

Alcott in the Classroom

Despite the fact that Louisa May Alcott spent a fair amount of time as a teacher in the 1850s and early 1860s, and that James T. Fields supposedly told her in 1871, “stick to your teaching” since she couldn’t write, Alcott herself found teaching “hard work” that she didn’t like. Nevertheless, the contemporary classroom remains a place of prime opportunity, not only for probing the breadth and depth of her work but for continuing and expanding her readership – even more so now than it had been for many years, since so much more of her oeuvre is now available to us.  This panel seeks innovative ideas for including Alcott’s works in courses, either as the prime focus in those dedicated specifically to her or among other writers in courses dedicated to any number of themes. Do you teach Moods in an examination of transcendentalism?  Work in a course on feminist writers? Her children’s novels in a course on children’s literature or nineteenth-century child studies or education? Her Civil War fiction in a course dedicated to that particular literature? Do you teach Alcott parallel to or contrasting with other writers she admired (or didn’t!) – Goethe, Bronte, Hawthorne, Davis, Twain, Henry James?  What kinds of approaches have been successful in bringing students to a greater understanding of her work? We hope to explore these possibilities and more in the presentations for this panel. Please send 300-word abstracts by email to Christine Doyle at doylec@ccsu.edu by Friday, January 19, 2018.  Early submissions are welcome.