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Palgrave Macmillan

Kate Chopin and the City

The New Orleans Stories

  • Book
  • © 2024

Overview

Authors:
  1. Heather Ostman

    1. English Department, Westchester Community College, Valhalla, USA

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  • Explores the representation of New Orleans in Kate Chopin’s short stories and novels
  • Argues that Chopin’s depictions of New Orleans offer new insights into the advent of modernity
  • Reveals the historical, social and aesthetic contributions of the city and its practices of inequity and cruelty

Part of the book series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century (ALTC)

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xv
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  2. Introduction: Kate Chopin and the City—The New Orleans Stories

    • Heather Ostman
    Pages 1-23

  3. The French-American City: The Two Worlds of Chopin Fiction

    • Heather Ostman
    Pages 25-55

  4. Mobility and Autonomy: Chopin’s Women Characters Around Town

    • Heather Ostman
    Pages 57-82

  5. City Business: Commerce and the Short Fiction

    • Heather Ostman
    Pages 83-108

  6. Bayou St. John Stories

    • Heather Ostman
    Pages 109-130

  7. “Her position in the universe”: The Awakening’s Edna Pontellier and New Orleans

    • Heather Ostman
    Pages 131-157

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 159-173
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Authors and Affiliations

  • English Department, Westchester Community College, Valhalla, USA

    Heather Ostman

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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