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.

A collection of critical essays on Kate Chopin's work.

Providing all the tools for engaged, informed individual analysis of the text, this is an essential starting point for students of American literature and women's writing, or for anyone fascinated by Chopin's controversial work.

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.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Kate Chopin: A Writer of and beyond Her Time is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

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.

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 Study Guide for Kate Chopin's "The Awakening," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.