Kate Chopin In The Twenty First Century

The essays in Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century update Chopin scholarship, creating pathways, both broad and narrow, for study in a new century. Given Chopin’s atypical literary career and her frequent writing about unconventional themes for her time—such as divorce, infidelity, and suicide—she may have approved such approaches as the essays here suggest. This collection of essays offers readers newer ways of thinking about Chopin’s works. They break away from the familiar trends of the feminist considerations of her work, ranging from her short stories, to her lesser-known novel, At Fault, to her best-known work, The Awakening. Part one introduces interdisciplinary themes for reading “culture” in Chopin, including urban living and theatre as a lens for viewing New Orleans’s social and class stratifications; the importance of music—a central interest of Chopin’s—in her texts; and the cultural relevance of Vogue magazine, where eighteen of Chopin’s stories were first published. Part two identifies important and overlapping concerns of religion, race, class, and gender within the contexts of selected short works. And part three offers fresh readings of The Awakening, using the lens of race, as well as the lens of class to reconsider protagonist Edna Pontellier’s transformation and her dependency upon the “rights” of privilege within a specific cultural context. Together, all of the essays in the collection, by both established and newer scholars, help to usher Chopin’s work into the twenty-first century.

This book examines selected short stories and novels by Kate Chopin through the lens of the city of New Orleans. Chopin’s depictions of and references to New Orleans celebrate the vibrancy of this unique American city, but also illustrate the complex, interdependent relationships defined within its coded system of racial, gendered, and class designations. These stories feature canny depictions of the complexity of human struggles for freedom as well as love within this nineteenth-century southern city. While Chopin has been highly regarded as a local color writer and especially as a feminist literary icon, this book shows how the author’s “city” stories also point to her sophistication as an author who perceived the shifting literary landscape, and it identifies the ways many of these stories’ protomodernist elements anticipate the advent of the Modern era.

The essays in Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century update Chopin scholarship, creating pathways, both broad and narrow, for study in a new century. Given Chopinâ (TM)s atypical literary career and her frequent writing about unconventional themes for her timeâ "such as divorce, infidelity, and suicideâ "she may have approved such approaches as the essays here suggest. This collection of essays offers readers newer ways of thinking about Chopinâ (TM)s works. They break away from the familiar trends of the feminist considerations of her work, ranging from her short stories, to her lesser-known novel, At Fault, to her best-known work, The Awakening. Part one introduces interdisciplinary themes for reading â oecultureâ in Chopin, including urban living and theatre as a lens for viewing New Orleansâ (TM)s social and class stratifications; the importance of musicâ "a central interest of Chopinâ (TM)sâ "in her texts; and the cultural relevance of Vogue magazine, where eighteen of Chopinâ (TM)s stories were first published. Part two identifies important and overlapping concerns of religion, race, class, and gender within the contexts of selected short works. And part three offers fresh readings of The Awakening, using the lens of race, as well as the lens of class to reconsider protagonist Edna Pontellierâ (TM)s transformation and her dependency upon the â oerightsâ of privilege within a specific cultural context. Together, all of the essays in the collection, by both established and newer scholars, help to usher Chopinâ (TM)s work into the twenty-first century.

Featuring essays by scholars from around the globe, Kate Chopin in Context revitalizes discussions on the famed 19th-century author of The Awakening . Expanding the horizons of Chopin's influence, contributors offer readers glimpses into the multi-national appreciation and versatility of the author's works, including within the classroom setting.

This book explores the Catholic aesthetic and mystical dimensions in Kate Chopin’s fiction within the context of an evolving American Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close reading of her novels and numerous short stories, Kate Chopin and Catholicism looks at the ways Chopin represented Catholicism in her work as a literary device that served on multiple levels: as an aesthetic within local color depictions of Louisiana, as a trope for illuminating the tensions surrounding nineteenth-century women’s struggles for autonomy, as a critique of the Catholic dogma that subordinated authenticity and physical and emotional pleasure, and as it pointed to the distinction between religious doctrine and mystical experience, and enabled the articulation of spirituality beyond the context of the Church. This book reveals Chopin to be not only a literary visionary but a writer who saw divinity in the natural world.

A collection of transformative stories that emphasize women’s roles in society. The works of Kate Chopin were nearly forgotten for much of the twentieth century, but her popularity made a resurgence in the 1970s when readers and scholars turned their attention to early women’s literature. The Awakening, her best-known novel, is set in the Gulf Coast region around New Orleans, and is critically acclaimed for its style and for being ahead of its time in discussing important women’s issues. Also included in this volume are several of Chopin’s short stories, including “Désirée’s Baby” and “The Story of an Hour.”

This book questions why so many mothers leave their families in twenty-first-century Swedish literature, analyzing literary representations of maternal abandonment in relation to sociopolitical discourses. The volume draws on a queer-theoretical framework in order to highlight norm-critical dimensions, failure, and resistance in literature about motherhood. Jenny Björklund argues that novels about mothers who leave can be understood as ways to problematize and challenge Swedish-branded values like gender equality and a progressive family politics that promotes ideals of involved parenthood, the nuclear family, and pronatalism. The book also raises questions beyond the Swedish context about maternal ambivalence, family politics, and privilege and discusses how literature can work as resistance and provide alternatives to the current social order.