Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival

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 No...