In a career that lasted little more than a decade, Kate Chopin became well-known for stories set in the Creole and Acadian regions of Louisiana, but her masterwork, The Awakening (1899), told the daring story of a woman who defied social and sexual conventions, eliciting negative reviews that denied Chopin prominence until the middle of the twentieth century. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life sets the author in the context of nineteenth-century American women writers to show how standards of literary propriety affected the career of a major American writer.
In a career that lasted little more than a decade, Kate Chopin became well-known for stories set in the Creole and Acadian regions of Louisiana, but h...
For centuries, women who aspired to write had to enter a largely male literary tradition that offered few, if any, literary forms in which to express their perspectives on lived experience. Since the nineteenth century, however, women writers and readers have been producing "disobedient" counter-narratives that, while clearly making reference to the original texts, overturn their basic assumptions.
This book looks at both canonical and non-canonical works, over a variety of fiction and nonfiction genres, that offer counter-readings of familiar Western narratives. Nancy Walker begins...
For centuries, women who aspired to write had to enter a largely male literary tradition that offered few, if any, literary forms in which to expre...