_Little Women_ is a work composed piecemeal and narrated in more than one generic mode. Alcott’s complete financial dependence on what she could earn from her writing, her ambivalence toward conventional narratives for women, and, most importantly, her alternating submission to and rebellion against the demands (real and imagined) of her readers…[Read more]

A short blog post for the CLIR Re:Thinking blog on recent high-profile events at the Boston Public Library and the Library of Congress that led to the departure of library directors Amy Ryan and James Billington.

This article gives a brief biographical sketch of Iseult Gonne, daughter of Irish activist Maud Gonne and wife of the Irish author Francis Stuart. It also describes and analyzes her relationship with the poet W.B. Yeats, who once proposed to her, and discusses her role in several of Yeats’s poems, including “To a Child Dancing in the Wind.” The…[Read more]

Poets and scholars are all wrong about the villanelle. While most reference texts teach that the villanelle’s nineteen-line alternating-refrain form was codified in the Renaissance, the scholar Julie Kane has conclusively shown that Jean Passerat’s “Villanelle” (“J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle”), written in 1574 and first published in 1606, is the only…[Read more]