A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CROSS-CULTURAL BIOGRAPHICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Keywords:
Louisa May Alcott, cross-cultural biography, feminist life-writing, reception theory, world literature, transnational studies.Abstract
This article examines cross-cultural biographical representations of Louisa May Alcott across five national traditions: the United States, Japan, South Korea, France, and Germany. Drawing on feminist life-writing theory, reception aesthetics, and world literature frameworks, it argues that biography operates as a form of ideological re-authoring rather than neutral historical reconstruction. Based on a purposively selected corpus of 32 biographical and critical texts (1889–2022), the study identifies three dominant representational paradigms: the domesticated moral exemplar, the feminist literary pioneer, and the transnational cultural commodity. Through comparative analysis, the article demonstrates how these paradigms restructure narrative causality, selectively foregrounding aspects of Alcott’s life in accordance with culturally specific gender norms, literary values, and institutional priorities. The study advances a methodological framework for comparative biography and contributes to debates in feminist criticism and transnational literary studies by reconceptualizing life-writing as a primary site of cultural negotiation within global literary systems.
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