Overview
Develops a new lens for Chopin scholarship
Explores the Catholic aesthetic in Chopin’s novels and short stories
Links Chopin’s Catholic aesthetic to the protomodernist elements in her fiction
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book explores the Catholic aesthetic and mystical dimensions in Kate
Chopin’s fiction within the context of an evolving American Catholicism in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close reading of her
novels and numerous short stories, Kate Chopin and Catholicism looks at the
ways Chopin represented Catholicism in her work as a literary device that served
on multiple levels: as an aesthetic within local color depictions of Louisiana, as a
trope for illuminating the tensions surrounding nineteenth-century women’s
struggles for autonomy, as a critique of the Catholic dogma that subordinated
authenticity and physical and emotional pleasure, and as it pointed to the
distinction between religious doctrine and mystical experience, and enabled the
articulation of spirituality beyond the context of the Church. This book reveals
Chopin to be not only a literary visionary but a writer who saw divinity in the
natural world.
Reviews
“Ostman makes careful observations regarding Chopin's modernism and how it related early modernist movements. Her close readings of Chopin's work reveal her awareness of social, religious, and scientific issues of the time. … Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.” (T. Bonner Jr., Choice, Vol. 58 (9), 2021)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Heather Ostman is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at SUNY Westchester Community College. She is President of the Kate Chopin International Society, and her books include Kate Chopin in Context: New Critical Essays (2015), Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century (2008), The Fiction of Junot Díaz: Reframing the Lens (2016), and Writing Program Administration and the Community College (2013).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Kate Chopin and Catholicism
Authors: Heather Ostman
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44022-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-44021-3Published: 14 May 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-44024-4Published: 14 May 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-44022-0Published: 13 May 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 229
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, North American Literature, Catholicism