The Historian's Awakening: Reading Kate Chopin's Classic Novel as Social and Cultural History (Historian's Annotated Classics)

The Historians Awakening is a full commentary on the text (included) that provides social and cultural history context discussions of the author and her times as well as valuable insight into historical forces that shaped peoples lives.Kate Chopins classic novel about a modern woman who desires to break free from tradition endures in part due to its critical and thought-provoking themes about society. While many editions of Kate Chopins classic novel are in print only The Historians Awakening deals exclusively with the 19th-century social and cultural environment from which the novel emerged. In The Awakening Kate Chopin portrays a modern woman who seeks autonomy subjected to intense social and cultural conventions that first draw her out of her lifelong solitude but ultimately leave her feeling even more alone. This newly annotated edition focuses on how 19th-century ideas about class gender ethnicity and modernity affect a courageous womans life. Challenging prevailing scholarship by situating the novel within a rich historical context it examines the social and cultural realities of the 1890s and explains how in the novel these forces combine with an emerging modernity to liberate and unsettle its female protagonist.Introduces the novel with essays on the life and times of the author by a leading Chopin scholarIncludes two hundred annotationsIllustrates that understanding nineteenth-century womens struggles like that of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening demands attention to more than the usual focus on the oppression of women by menShows that Ednas struggle is defined by the conventions of upper-class people in the 1880s and 1890s is intensified by obligations imposed upon wealthy women and results in a severe discontent that haunts people in modern societies even todayOffers readers a deeper and more rewarding reading of The Awakening