The Companion to Kate Chopin

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.

Contents:

What we do and don't know about Kate Chopin's life / Emily Toth
At fault : a reappraisal of kate Chopin's other novel / Donna Campbell 
Kate Chopin and the subject of childhood / Pamela Knights 
"Race" and ethnicity in Kate Chopin's fiction / Susan Castillo 
Kate Chopin on fashion in a Darwinian world / Katherine Joslin 
The awakening and new woman fiction / Ann Heilmann 
Reading Kate Chopin through contemporary French feminist theory / Michael Worton 
The awakening as literary innovation : Chopin, Maupassant and the evolution of genre / Elizabeth Nolan
Kate Chopin, choice and modernism / Avril Horner
"The perfume of the past" : Kate Chopin and post-colonial New Orleans / Helen Taylor
The awakening : the first 100 years / Bernard Koloski