Critical Essays on Kate Chopin PDF Download

Author: Alice Hall Petry
Publisher: Twayne Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Series Editors: James Nagel, University of Georgia; Zack Bowen, University of Miami and Robert Lecker, McGill University The full range of literary traditions comes to life in the Twayne Critical Essays Series. Volume editors have carefully selected critical essays that represent the full spectrum of controversies, trends, and methodologies relating to each author's work. Essays include writings from the author's native country and abroad, with interpretations from the time they were writing, through the present day. Each volume includes: An introduction providing the reader with a lucid overview of criticism from its beginnings-illuminating controversies, evaluating approaches and sorting out the schools of thought The most influential reviews and the best reprinted scholarly essays A section devoted exclusively to reviews and reactions by the subject's contemporaries Original essays, new translations, and revisions commissioned especially for the series Previously unpublished materials such as interviews, lost letters and manuscript fragments A bibliography of the subject's writings and interviews.

Author: Heather Ostman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527563731
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
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.

Author: Per Seyersted
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807106785
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Kate Chopin was a nationally acclaimed short story artist of the local color school when she in 1899 shocked the American reading public with The Awakening, a novel which much resembles Madame Bovary. Though the critics praised the artistic excellence of the book, it was generally condemned for its objective treatment of the sensuous, independent heroine. Deeply hurt by the censure, Mrs. Chopin wrote little more, and she was soon forgotten. For decades the few critics who remembered her concentrated on the regional aspects of her work. In the Literary History of the United States, where Kate Chopin is highly praised as a local colorist, The Awakening is not even mentioned. In recent years, however, a few critics have given new attention to the novel, emphasizing its courageous realism. In the present book, Mr. Seyersted carries out an extensive re-examination of both the life and work of the author, basing it on her total oeuvre. Much new Kate Chopin material, such as previously unknown stories, letters, and a diary, has recently come to light. We can now see that she was a much more ambitious and purposeful writer than we have hitherto known. From the beginning, her special theme was female self-assertion. As each new success increased her self-confidence, she grew more and more daring in her descriptions of emancipated woman who wants to dictate her own life. Mr. Seyersted traces the author’s growth as an artist and as a penetrating interpreter of the female condition, and shows how her career culminated in The Awakening and the unknown story ‘The Storm.’ With these works, which were decades ahead of their time, Kate Chopin takes her place among the important American realist writers of the 1890’s.

Author: Heather Ostman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807177784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The New View from Cane River features ten in-depth essays that provide fresh, diverse perspectives on Kate Chopin’s first novel, At Fault. While much critical work on the author prioritizes her famous, groundbreaking second book, The Awakening, its 1890 predecessor remains a fascinating text that presents a complicated moral universe, including a plot that involves divorce, alcoholism, and murder set in the aftermath of the Civil War. Edited by Chopin scholar Heather Ostman, the essays in The New View from Cane River provide multiple approaches for understanding this complex work, with particular attention to the dynamics of the post-Reconstruction era and its effects on race, gender, and economics in Louisiana. Original perspectives introduced by the contributors include discussions of Chopin’s treatment of privilege, sexology, and Unitarianism, as well as what At Fault reveals about the early stages of literary modernism and the reading audiences of late nineteenth-century America. This overdue reconsideration of an overlooked novel gives enthusiastic readers, students, and instructors an opportunity for new encounters with a cherished American author.

Author: Kate Chopin
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807149608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1034

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Book Description
In 1969, Per Seyersted gave the world the first collected works of Kate Chopin. Seyersted's presentation of Chopin's writings and biographical and bibliographical information led to the rediscovery and celebration of this turn-of-the-century author. Newsweek hailed the two-volume opus -- "In story after story and in all her novels, Kate Chopin's oracular feminism and prophetic psychology almost outweigh her estimable literary talents. Her revival is both interesting and timely." Now for the first time, Seyersted'sComplete Works is available in a single-volume paperback. It is the first and only paperback edition of Chopin's total oeuvre. Containing twenty poems, ninety-six stories, two novels, and thirteen essays -- in short, everything Chopin wrote except several additional poems and three unfinished children's stories -- as well as Seyersted's original revelatory introduction and Edmund Wilson's foreword, this anthology is both a historical and a literary achievement. It is ideal for anyone who wishes to explore the pleasures of reading this highly acclaimed author.

Author: Kate Chopin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393623637
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
“I have used the Norton Critical Editions since graduate school. As a teacher of high-school literature, I find them to be excellent resources for the study of various novels, plays, etc."—Brooke Gifford, Vincent Middle High School This Norton Critical Edition includes: • The annotated text of Kate Chopin’s modernist novel of marital infidelity, set in New Orleans and Grande Isle, Louisiana. • A preface, a critical essay, and explanatory annotations by Margo Culley. • Essays by acclaimed Chopin biographers Per Seyersted and Emily Toth, “An Etiquette/Advice Book Sampler” with selections from the conduct books of the period, and contemporary perspectives on womanhood, motherhood, and marriage. • Forty-five reviews and interpretive essays on The Awakening spanning three centuries. • A Chronology of Chopin’s life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Author: Kate Chopin
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
ISBN: 1513276603
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
At Fault (1890) is a novel by American author Kate Chopin. Published at the author’s expense, At Fault is the undervalued debut of a pioneering feminist and gifted writer who sought to portray the experiences of Southern women struggling to survive in an era decimated by war and economic hardship. Thérèse Lafirme is a Creole widow whose husband’s death has made the Place-du-Bois plantation on the Cane River in northwestern Louisiana her sole responsibility. Struggling to survive in a region that, following the fall of the Confederacy, has failed to recover from the devastation of defeat, Lafirme agrees to sell her land’s timber rights to a recently divorced businessman named David Hosmer. As the two begin to fall in love, Hosmer’s sawmill causes tension in an agrarian community unaccustomed to modern industry. Hosmer proposes to Thérèse, she is forced to consider the prospect of marriage against the opinion her community as well as her own moral and religious values, to set her personal desires aside in order to appease tradition. When Fanny, Hosmer’s alcoholic ex-wife, re-enters the picture, trouble ensues that threatens to ruin Lafirme’s reputation as an honest, hardworking woman. At Fault, like much of Chopin’s work, went largely unnoticed upon publication, but has since garnered critical acclaim as a work that explores the lived experiences of women and racial minorities during a period of political and economic upheaval. Both fictional and autobiographical—Chopin was a widow of French heritage who struggled to provide for her family following her husband’s death—At Fault is an underappreciated masterpiece of nineteenth-century literature. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Kate Chopin’s At Fault is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Author: Lynda S. Boren
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807166480
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
In this indispensable volume, fourteen intellectually compelling essays consider Kate Chopin's life and art from a variety of critical perspectives—biographical, New Historicist, materialist, poststructuralist, feminist—with several of the pieces focusing on Chopin's classic novel, The Awakening.

Author: Kate Chopin
Publisher: Modernista
ISBN: 9180945252
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
In late 19th-century New Orleans, social constraints are strict, especially for a married woman. Edna Pontellier leads a secure life with her husband and two children, but her restlessness grows within the confined societal norms, and the expectations placed upon her – from her husband and the world around her – create increasing pressure. During a trip to Grand Isle, an island off the coast of Louisiana, her life is turned upside down by an intense love affair, and passion forces her to question the foundations of her – and every woman’s – existence. Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening caused a scandal with its outspokenness when it was published in 1899. The novel’s openly sexual themes and disregard for marital and societal conventions led to it not being reprinted for fifty years. It wasn't until the 1950s that Chopin’s work was rediscovered, and The Awakening received significant acclaim. Today, it is not only seen as an early feminist milestone but also as a classic. KATE CHOPIN [1851–1904] was born in St Louis. She had six children during her marriage, and it wasn't until after her husband's death in 1882 that she emerged as a writer. She published short stories in magazines such as Vogue and The Atlantic, gaining appreciation and recognition for her depictions of the American South. However, she was also criticized for her disregard for social traditions and racial barriers.

Author: Kate Chopin
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 1443435198
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description
Mrs. Louise Mallard, afflicted with a heart condition, reflects on the death of her husband from the safety of her locked room. Originally published in Vogue magazine, “The Story of an Hour” was retitled as “The Dream of an Hour,” when it was published amid much controversy under its new title a year later in St. Louis Life. “The Story of an Hour” was adapted to film in The Joy That Kills by director Tina Rathbone, which was part of a PBS anthology called American Playhouse. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.