The awakening has assumed a place in the American literary canon. This edition places the novel in the context of the cultural and regional influences that shape Chopin's narrative. This novel has extensive contemporary readings that examine historical events, including the hurricanes that frequently disrupt life in Louisiana.

Suzanne L. Disheroon is Professor of English at Cedar Valley College, Dallas, Texas.

Barbara C. Ewell is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguised Professor of English at Loyola University, New Orleans.

Pamela Glenn Menke is Vice Provost, Education at Miami Dade College and former Professor, English at Regis College.

Susie Scifres is an independent scholar.

She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.

Condemned as 'sordid' and 'immoral' on its publication in 1899, this story of a woman trapped in her marriage effectively ended Chopin's career but was revived as a proto-feminist classic in the 1970s. What Newsweek calls Chopin's 'prophetic psychology' insures its timeliness today.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century American writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. When her most famous story, The Awakening, was first published in 1899, it stunned readers with its frank portrayal of the inner word of Edna Pontellier, and its daring criticisms of the limits of marriage and motherhood. The subtle beauty of her writing was contrasted with her unwomanly and sordid subject-matter: Edna's rejection of her domestic role, and her passionate quest for spiritual, sexual, and artistic freedom. From her first stories, Chopin was interested in independent characters who challenged convention. This selection, freshly edited from the first printing of each text, enables readers to follow her unfolding career as she experimented with a broad range of writing, from tales for children to decadent fin-de siecle sketches. The Awakening is set alongside thirty-two short stories, illustrating the spectrum of the fiction from her first published stories to her 1898 secret masterpiece, 'The Storm.'

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Durante una vacanza estiva a Grande Isle (Louisiana), Edna Pontellier, giovane madre di famiglia sposata a un facoltoso uomo d'affari di New Orleans, si accorge di aver vissuto un'esistenza lontana dalle sue aspirazioni più autentiche e s'innamora di un uomo più giovane di lei. Al rientro in città, rifiutando per sempre le convenzioni sociali e culturali che hanno soffocato la sua personalità e i suoi desideri, Edna intraprende un solitario cammino di rinascita interiore che culminerà in un risveglio dei sensi e dello spirito.

ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED

BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP

EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES:

• A concise introduction that gives readers important background information

• A chronology of the author's life and work

• A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context

• An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations

• Detailed explanatory notes

• Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work

• Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction

• A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience

Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.

SERIES EDITED BY CYNTHIA BRANTLEY JOHNSON

'Questo piccolo ventaglio di racconti si apre ventilando una scrittura di cento anni fa, ancora viva nella sua laminare leggerezza ironica e precisa nella sua mira: ritrae con pochi segni incisivi, una donna alla luce di una sua fase esistenziale decisiva in cui si compie drammaticamente la coscienza della propria identità femminile. Kate Chopin torna a stupirci. Vicina e toccante, superba nei suoi tessuti narrativi. Tra il centinaio di racconti che la scrittrice americana scrisse, questi inediti proposti sono, secondo me, carte preziose. In ciascuno pulsa una microscopica anima autobiografica, il cui battito, tuttavia, espande una risonanza forte e universale.' (Anna Maria Farabbi)

When The Awakening was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's literary and social reputation. But a century after her death, it is widely regarded as Kate Chopin's great achievement.
Through careful, subtle changes of style, Chopin shows the transformation of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother who - with tragic consequences - refuses to be caged by married and domestic life and claims for herself moral and erotic freedom.

From ruined Louisiana plantations to bustling, cosmopolitan New Orleans, Kate Chopin wrote with unflinching honesty about propriety and its strictures, the illusions of love and the realities of marriage, and the persistence of a past scarred by slavery and war. Her stories of fiercely independent women, culminating in her masterpiece The Awakening (1899), challenged contemporary mores as much by their sensuousness as their politics, and today seem decades ahead of their time. Now, The Library of America collects all of Chopin's novels and stories as never before in one authoritative volume.

The explosive novel At Fault (1890) centers on a love triangle between a strong-willed young widow, a stiff St. Louis businessman, and the man's alcoholic wife. In the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), Chopin transforms the local color sketch into taut, perfectly calibrated tales of post-Civil War bayou culture. In The Awakening, the now-classic novel that scandalized many of her contemporaries and effectively ended her writing career, Chopin tells the story of a restless, unsatisfied woman who embarks on a quixotic search for fulfillment.

The volume also includes all the stories not collected by Chopin, including those meant for 'A Vocation and a Voice,' a projected volume that her publisher canceled in 1900, and three stories that were found in 1992 in a long-lost cache of Chopin's papers.

Collects short stories about life in rural Louisiana during the late nineteenth century.

The Awakening shocked turn-of-the-century readers with its forthright treatment of sex and suicide. Departing from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed to condemn her heroine's desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana resort owner, whom she meets on vacation. The power of sensuality, the delusion of ecstatic love, and the solitude that accompanies the trappings of middle- and upper-class life are the themes of this now-classic novel. As Kaye Gibbons points out in her Introduction, Chopin "was writing American realism before most Americans could bear to hear that they were living it."

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes selected stories from Chopin's Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie.

In the decade before the appearance of her landmark novel, The Awakening, Kate Chopin published Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), collections of stories set in New Orleans and rural Louisiana. Celebrations of people in their communities, the forty-four stories here depict a diversity of characters: Creoles, Acadians, and 'Americans,' people of color and of mixed blood, Native Americans and immigrants, adults and children, the educated and the illiterate, the rich and the poor. Some stories focus on the restrictions women face as they seek self-fulfillment - a theme Chopin would develop fully in The Awakening - but many show people striving to establish better lives amid the devastation following the Civil War.
With a compassionate, knowing gaze, Chopin not only evokes the distant world of plantations and 'Cadian balls, but also anticipates the thoroughly modern, multi-ethnic, gender-sensitive, and sexually charged world that we know today.

Il divorzio è il 'difetto' che impedisce all'amore tra i due protagonisti di realizzarsi; ma il titolo originale 'At Fault' significa 'in errore' ed è una forma di arroganza morale che fa commettere a Thérèse l'errore di voler decidere della vita degli altri, oltre che della sua, senza tenere conto della realtà e provocando l'infelicità di tutti. Un difetto, una mancanza di amore accomuna anche gli altri personaggi e sarà solo alla fine del romanzo che Thérèse si assumerà la responsabilità di amare; proprio il riconoscimento di questa responsabilità (conferma della necessità di riparare all'indugio di coraggio, di temperare l'avventatezza del giudizio, di assumersi la passione) trasforma il difetto in un pieno di amore.

Novelist and short story writer Kate Chopin (1851-1904) was the first American woman to deal with women's roles as wives and mothers. The Awakening (1899), her most famous novel, concerns a woman, dissatisfied with her indifferent husband, who gives in to her desire for other men and commits adultery. This is a searing depiction of the religious and social pressures brought to bear on women who transgress restrictive Victorian codes of behavior.

Presents The Awakening, a pioneering short novel, originally published in 1899, that tells the story of a nineteenth-century woman who seeks independence from her stifling marriage, and seventeen short stories, including 'A Shameful Affair' and 'Madame Celestin's Divorce.' Reissue.

€ 5,75

First published in 1899, a seminal novel by one of America's first feminist writers features a businessman's wife who, while spending the summer in a seaside resort away from her husband, begins to yearn for freedom and personal fulfillment. Reissue.

This Second Edition of a perennial favorite in the Norton Critical Edition series represents an extensive revision of its predecessor. The text is that of the first edition of the novel, published by Herbert S. Stone in 1899. It has been annotated by the editor and includes translations of French phrases and information about New Orleans locales, customs, and lore, the Bayou region, and Creole culture. 'Bibliographical and Historical Contexts', expanded and introduced by a new Editor's Note, presents biographical, historical, and cultural documents contemporary with the novel's publication. Included are a biographical essay by the acclaimed Chopin biographer Emily Toth, 'An Etiquette/Advice Book Sampler' with selections from the conduct books of the period in which Chopin lived and wrote, and period fashion plates from Harper's Bazar. A comprehensive 'Criticism' section, introduced by a new Editor's Note, contains expanded selections from hard-to-find contemporary reviews of the novel; two letters of mysterious origin written in response to the novel; and Chopin's 'Retraction,' which followed The Awakening's negative reception. These are followed by twenty-seven interpretive essays, twelve of them new to the Second Edition, that provide a variety of perspectives on The Awakening, including essays by Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Nancy Walker, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Paula A. Treichler, Sandra M. Gilbert, Lee R. Edwards, Patricia S. Yaeger, Elizabeth Ammons, and Elaine Showalter. A Chronology of Chopin's life and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.