“Hearty and happy and with a lively, yeasty soul:” feeling right in Louisa May Alcott'sThe Candy Country

Abstract

This article discusses a short story by Louisa May Alcott in which a young white girl is transported into three parallel worlds: Candy Land, Cake Land and Bread Land. This article argues that Alcott uses these three food nations to both portray the history of US imperial exceptionalism and also to trace out a biopolitical imperative through which whiteness is granted the right to live on, while blackness is instrumentalized in the service of white survival. More unusually, in this story, Alcott explores the fermentative qualities of yeast to depict the unequally distributed and yet biologically universal sensation of living “right” within an affective-biopolitical order.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.