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.
Table of Content
Introduction.- 1 Post-Civil War Stories.- 2 Art, Music, and Language.- 3 Postbellum Transitions.- 4 The “Protomodern” City.- 5 New Orleans and Chopin’s Novels.- Conclusion.
About the author
Heather Ostman is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at SUNY Westchester Community College, USA. She is co-founder and President of the Kate Chopin International Society, and has published four books on Chopin:
Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century (2008),
Kate Chopin in Context: New Approaches (2015),
Kate Chopin and Catholicism (2020) and
The New View from Cane River: Kate Chopin’s At Fault (2021).
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