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Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival
Paperback
Series: Southern Literary Studies
Letters & EssaysLiterary Criticism
ISBN13: 9780807143667
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: Jan 23 2012
Pages: 238
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.40
Language: English
One of the most often repeated anecdotes about the direction of literary studies over the past three decades concerns a graduate student who complained of reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening in three classes and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in none. But Chopin has not always been featured in the literary curriculum. Though she achieved national success in her lifetime (1850--1904) as a writer of Louisiana local color fiction, after her death her work fell into obscurity until 1969, when Norwegian literary scholar Per Seyersted published The Complete Works of Kate Chopin and sparked a remarkable American literary revival. Chopin soon became a major presence in the canon, and today every college textbook surveying American literature contains a Chopin short story, her novel The Awakening, or an excerpt from it.
Throughout, these essays stress several elements vital to the revival's success. Timing proved critical, as the rise of the women's movement and the emergence of new sexual norms in the 1960s helped set an ideal context for Chopin in the United States and abroad in the 1970s and 1980s. Seyersted's biography of Chopin and his accurate texts of her entire oeuvre allowed scholars to quickly publish their analyses of her work. Popular media -- including Redbook, New York Times, and PBS -- took notice of Chopin and advanced her work outside the scholarly realm. But in the final analysis, as the contributors point out, Kate Chopin's irresistible writing itself made her revival possible.
Highly personal, at times amusing, and always thought provoking, these revealing recollections and new critical insights offer a fascinating firsthand account of a decisive moment in American literary history.
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