This issue of Meliora was published under the guidance of editors-in-chief Wynona Barua and Meredith Phipps with the support of faculty advisors Professor Atefeh Akbari and Professor Lisa Gordis.

Within this issue, readers will have the opportunity to engage with Joanna Gao’s illuminating work concerning plural identities in Mrs. Spring Fragrance. They will also encounter Elizabeth Karpen’s new insight into a well-loved classic as she conducts her examination of marriage, labor, and suppression in Little Women. They will dive into Olivia English’s deep analysis of the the 19th-century trope of the unwell child as it occurs in Little Women and The Morgesons. They will join Sophie Poole in her exploration of the feminist and materialistic philosophies at work in Caryl Churchill’s stageplay Top Girls. 

Meliora presents scholarship that brings understudied works into the light as well as scholarship that sheds a new light on canonized texts. In doing so, it creates a space for undergraduate scholars to perform and share the essential work of challenging the status of the existing canon while also revealing new angles and implications of its contents.