The New View from Cane River : Critical Essays on Kate Chopin's "At Fault" / edited by Heather Ostman.

9780807177778

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2022]

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2022

©[2022]

1 online resource (234 pages).

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"The New View from Cane River features ten in-depth essays that provide diverse perspectives on Kate Chopin's first novel, At Fault (1890). While much critical work on Chopin prioritizes her famous, groundbreaking second novel, The Awakening (1899), At Fault remains, as the contributors to this collection show, a fascinating text that addresses difficult topics such as divorce, alcoholism, and murder. Set on the banks of the Cane River after the Civil War, At Fault tells the story of Therese Lafirme, a thirty-five-year-old widow who manages her deceased husband's plantation, Place-du-Bois. Although she initially chooses to uphold religious-based ideals at the expense of happiness with the man she loves, a series of melodramatic and tumultuous events lead Therese to question her own moral rigidity and embrace a new marriage based in equality. Edited by Chopin scholar Heather Ostman, the essays in The New View from Cane River offer multiple approaches for understanding this text, with particular attention to the dynamics of the post-Civil War era and its effects on race, gender, and economics in Louisiana. New perspectives introduced by the contributors include discussions of Chopin's treatment of privilege, sexology, and Unitarianism, as well as what At Fault reveals about the early stages of literary modernism and the reading audiences of late nineteenth-century America"-- Provided by publisher.

Project MUSE complete collection 2022.

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English

July 19, 2023