Specimen Collectors

This chapter examines the early history of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and broader conversations about the representation of the natural world as fixed and stable. While the museum’s founder, Louis Agassiz, emphasized the value of preserved specimens to research and teaching, many collectors and writers questioned such practices. After donating turtles to the museum, Henry David Thoreau contemplated the ethical and scientific implications of freezing nature for extended study. In children’s fiction, Louisa May Alcott emphasized the relationship between collecting specimens and moral order, while highlighting the growing gendered divide between scientific practice in the museum and the parlor. And in philosophical writings, William James drew on classification to consider more flexible possibilities to fixed theories. These accounts show how writers sought to promote a deeper understanding of flux and change both within the museum and beyond.

Hospital Sketches

In November 1862, Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) signed up as a volunteer nurse for the Sanitary Commission charged with caring for the Civil War’s mounting casualties. From 13 December 1862 until 21 January 1863, Miss Alcott served at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown in the District of Columbia, where she ultimately contracted typhoid and pneumonia and very nearly died. This book is her account of her journey south from Concord and her six weeks in the nation’s wartime capital. Styling herself by the fanciful name “Tribulation Periwinkle,” she brought humor as well as pathos to her subject, making this first-hand account of the absolute horrors of a 19th-century war hospital seem less shocking and more appreciative of the sacrifices being made by the wounded warriors and their families.

DEPICTION OF WOMEN IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN AND BRITISH FICTION

It was time of nineteenth century when women writers used to have male pennames for publication. Theme of marriage and society were prevalent in both American and British society. It was a microcosm of its own as women readers used to write about their life through the eyes of women writers. This phenomenon is historical as it stands between Mary Wollstonecraft, arguably the first feminist thinker and Virginia Woolf, arguably the most famous one. Changing times in the second half of nineteenth century was affecting the sensibility and religious clutches on society. It was also affecting notions of patriarchy. Writings of the time ought to reflect that. However, author also presumes a gender of her or his own before writing. That makes her or his gendering of character political and biased. But honest portrayals are important for examining depictions of women in a particular time. This paper aims to analyse two popular writers of the age, a female and a male, to understand the changing notions regarding patriarchy. American novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) have been written important social novels like novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Her novels features cast of female characters from the contemporary times. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a British writer writing detective fiction who used to portray his contemporary society. He also uses female characters in her stories. This paper aims to study works of both novelist employing methodologies of close reading and comparative literature to see how depiction of women in nineteenth century America and British fiction changes and what are the reasons for it.

Quando manca il detective. La presa in carico dell’investigazione in due racconti americani di fine Ottocento

A Whisper in the Dark” by Louisa May Alcott (1877) and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) offer an interesting, and not sufficiently investigated, perspective from the point of view of crime studies. Too intelligent and complex to be labelled as simple genre literature, and courted by gender studies, the two stories more aptly belong to Literature tout court, although many features normally lead to place them on the shelves of sensational, thriller, or mystery. The reading I propose stems from the desire to give voice to the two protagonists not only as victims of physical and psychological violence, but as active subjects and real Private Eyes within the narrative.

Fiction

The most lasting Christmas fiction tends to use Christmas as a setting not as the main subject and to draw from the warmth and sensory onslaught of the holidays and on friends and families gathering, not on the specific religious origins of the holiday. Yet religious themes persist in Christmas fiction right up to the present day, even when the stories take place in fantasy worlds, such as in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories and C. S. Lewis’ Narnia. This chapter is not comprehensive in its coverage but instead focuses on those works that seem to have had the greatest cultural impact, including those of Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Hans Christian Andersen, and Louisa May Alcott.

Anti-individualism in the Victorian Family Chronicle

The bildungsroman privileges singularity: the unique and, often, the only child. This essay turns away from familiar literary narratives of a protagonist's personal development in order to examine the narrative possibilities of a genre that instead maintains focus on a group of siblings: the Victorian family chronicle. Family chronicles understand their large families as systems; they celebrate the replaceability of relationships rather than the irreplaceability of individuals. By insisting that a flourishing group can function in the absence of any particular person, they achieve fulfillment not in individualist plots but in group activities and brimful houses. The most influential Victorian family chronicler was Charlotte Mary Yonge. Yonge's episodic form was taken up by Anthony Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Sidney. These writers’ chronicles are non-protagonistic, nearly plotless, and potentially endless. They have been dismissed as minor works; nonetheless the anti-individualism of the large family chronicle offers an innovative approach to the nineteenth-century novel's tense negotiation between individual needs and group membership. Glimpses of chronicle narration can be seen operating within and against the competitive character systems that dominate canonical Victorian novels. A twentieth-century variant, Gilbreth and Carey's Cheaper by the Dozen, proves that the mutualistic form is also capable of hardening the boundaries around a family unit in order to compete in a capitalist marketplace. Nonetheless, the family chronicles developed by Yonge model a social economy in which both narrative and economic resources are not concentrated on a single striver but are distributed across a system.