Kate Chopin and Catholicism

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.

• Religion
• Women's writing
• Gender
• Novel
• The Awakening

“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)

• Westchester Community College, Valhalla, USA

  Heather Ostman

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).

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