The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin

by Edited by Janet Beer

• ISBN13: 9780521709828
• ISBN10: 0521709822
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-10-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Although she enjoyed only modest success during her lifetime, Kate Chopin is now recognised as a unique voice in American literature. Her seminal novel, The Awakening, published in 1899, explored new and startling territory, and stunned readers with its frank depiction of the limits of marriage and motherhood. Chopin's aesthetic tastes and cultural influences were drawn from both the European and American traditions, and her manipulation of her 'foreignness' contributed to the composition of a complex voice that was strikingly different to that of her contemporaries. The essays in this Companion treat a wide range of Chopin's stories and novels, drawing her relationship with other writers, genres and literary developments, and pay close attention to the transatlantic dimension of her work. The result is a collection that brings a fresh perspective to Chopin's writing, one that will appeal to researchers and students of American, nineteenth-century, and feminist literature.

Table of Contents

Chronology

Introduction

What we do and don't know about Kate Chopin's life

At Fault: a reappraisal of Kate Chopin's other novel

Kate Chopin and the subject of childhood

'Race' and ethnicity in Kate Chopin's fiction

Kate Chopin on fashion in a Darwinian world

The Awakening and New Woman fiction

Reading Kate Chopin through contemporary French feminist theory

The Awakening as literary innovation: Chopin, Maupassant and the evolution of genre

Kate Chopin, choice and modernism

Kate Chopin and post-colonial New Orleans

The Awakening: the first hundred years

Guide to further reading

Index

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