Sari Edelstein

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Yellow Newspaper

In November 1909, Charlotte Perkins Gilman began publishing the Forerunner ̧ the monthly periodical that she would write and edit for the next seven years. Its mission, as she described it, was to “stimulate thought; to arouse hope, courage and impatience,” and to “express ideas which need a special medium” (Forerunner 32). She opened the first issue of the Forerunner with a poem in which she explicitly introduced her project as a response to an increasingly sensational press:

Louisa May Alcott's Age

This essay draws attention to how the institutionalization of childhood studies in American literary criticism unwittingly privileges youth over all other ages and reifies the stages of life themselves as essential categories rather than as cultural constructs. Given that age emerged as a primary identity category between 1820 and 1900, this essay argues that age offers an especially pertinent lens for nineteenth-century literary scholars. Louisa May Alcotts 1873 novel Work makes the political and social significance of age its central subject. Work acknowledges age as a newly meaningful coordinate of identity in the mid-nineteenth century, but it denaturalizes the seeming inevitability of gendered age norms and the developmental teleology that under-writes them. Ultimately, Work envisions alternative versions of female maturity that depart from linear models of aging as decline

May I Never Be a Man: Melville's Redburn and the Failure to Come of Age in Young America

“There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:— through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men and Ifs eternally.”