Isabelle Brandis

Isabelle Brandis studied English and American Studies as well as Scandinavian Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. She holds a master’s degree in North American Studies: Culture and Literature. Due to her vast interest in languages, she acquired basic knowledge of Spanish and Korean through language courses and self-study, and is furthermore fluent in English, Swedish and Danish. Her research interests focus on representations of race, class, gender and sexuality in popular culture and literature.

Project: Unraveling the Sentimental: Girlhood, Home, and Family Bonds in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Lucy Maud Mongomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Their Screen Adaptations

Children have always been at the center of sentimental discourse as almost nothing is more deeply rooted in sentimentalization than the depiction of a child and the process of coming-of-age. Childhoods and the relationships to family and kin provide a broad playing field for sentimental discourse and are often expressed in a sentimental code that can be well analyzed in literary texts and media representation. Anne of Green Gables (1908) by Lucy Maud Montgomery and Little Women (1868/69) by Louisa May Alcott are among the most beloved North American (children’s) classics, which still enjoy great popularity internationally since their publication, not least also thanks to their well-known adaptations. In my PhD project I will thus examine the complex portrayals of affective intensity as part of the Little Women and Anne of Green Gables narratives and consider changes in the characters’ identity constructions and interpersonal relationships throughout their various adaptational interpretations over the years. Further attention will be paid to the adoption or rejection of the narratives’ historically sentimentalized notions of marriage and female domesticity with a special focus on the significance that is ascribed to the concepts of family, the creation of kinship and community within the construction of home and a place of belonging. The planned research aims to demonstrate the nuances within the sentimental representations of nineteenth-century girlhood and familial bonds in a comparative juxtaposition of the original texts and their selected adaptations.