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List of contents
Introduction: "Little Women" in a Transatlantic World
Section 1: Transatlantic Girlhood
Travel Girl: The Value of Physical Fitness in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World Christiane E. Farnan
A Swiss-American Merger: Reading Johanna Spyri’s Heidi Within and Beyond the Canon of Nineteenth-Century American Sentimental Fiction
LuElla D’Amico and Tanja Stampfl
Anne’s Transatlantic Imagination: Reading as Travel in Anne of Green Gables
Amanda L. Anderson
Section 2: American Girls Abroad
"The delightful story was first in their minds": Dispelling Stereotypes While Indulging in Fictions in Elizabeth W. Champney’s Three Vassar Girls in England
Joyce E. Kelley
Girls’ Travel Fiction as Portable College: Elizabeth W. Champney’s Vassar Girls Series
Kathleen Chamberlain
"Is she a princess or only an American?": Transatlantic Travel and Identity Formation in Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Penelope Series
Brittany Biesiada
A World of Possibilities: Travel and Maturation in the Novels of Mary Jane Holmes
Lee Ann Elliott Westman
"everything, so indescribable, so never-to-be-forgotten": Reading Adeline Trafton’s An American Girl Abroad as a Cautionary Tale
Robin L. Cadwallader
Dreams of Youth: The Girl, the Writer, and the Nation in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad
Jordan L. Von Cannon
Section 3: Girlhood, Humane Offerings, and the Transatlantic Nature of Ideas
"Our humble words have gone over the seas": The Transatlantic Circulation of The Lowell Offering
Amber Shaw
A Transatlantic Queering of Kindness: Animality, Natural Childhood, and the Gendering of Humane Education
Kathryn Yeniyurt
Afterword
About the author
Robin L. Cadwallader is a Professor of English and the Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Saint Francis University, Pennsylvania, where she teaches American literature, women’s literature, young adult literature, and theory.
LuElla D’Amico is an Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas.
Summary
This collection is the first of its kind to interrogate both literal and metaphorical transatlantic exchanges of culture and ideas in nineteenth-century girls? fiction. It initiates conversations about how the motif of travel in literature taught nineteenth-century girl audiences to reexamine their own cultural biases.
