No other American book was so maligned, neglected for so long, and then embraced so quickly and with such enthusiasm as Kate Chopin's 1899 novel, The Awakening. And none has been so thoroughly redeemed. Considered vulgar, morbid, and disturbing in Chopin's time, it has for the...
One of the most often repeated anecdotes about the direction of literary studies over the past three decades concerns a graduate student who complained of reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening in three classes and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in none. But Chopin has not always...