The Awakening and Selected Stories (Warbler Classics)

by Kate Chopin, Rafael Walker (Introduction)

Overview

Kate Chopin's absorbing 1899 novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in New Orleans who, during a summer holiday, begins to question her conventional life. In this path-breaking novel, Chopin speculates more daringly than any before her about the consequences for middle-class women of late-nineteenth-century society's unleashing of female desire. Celebrated today as a key text in American literature, it scandalized early critics and, precisely because of its boldness, jeopardized Chopin's career. In this annotated, modernized edition-specially tailored for twenty-first-century readers-Rafael Walker highlights Chopin's awareness of the privileged class's exploitation of the the less-privileged, and includes a number of neglected stories that foreground Chopin's feminist proclivities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954525207
Publisher:	Warbler Classics
Publication date:	05/14/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	198
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was born in St. Louis and spent much of her life in Louisiana. Widowed with six children at age thirty-two, she published stories and articles often set in the Creole culture of late-nineteenth-century New Orleans. The candor and sympathy with which she explored the contours of modern women's lives were unprecedented. So prescient were Chopin's fictions that, many decades after her death, they would become touchstones for second-wave feminism.
Rafael Walker is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He has published on a wide range of topics in American literature, including Kate Chopin's fiction.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction by Rafael Walker iii

The Awakening 1

Emancipation. A Life Fable 139

A Pair of Silk Stockings 141

Miss Witherwell's Mistake 146

Désirée's Baby 155

The Story of an Hour 161

Wiser Than a God 164

Biographical Timeline 174