Kate Chopin Around the World - by Heather Ostman (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This collection brings a fresh, international lens to Chopin studies. The essays reflect on the experience of studying and teaching Chopin in countries outside of the United States, as well as frame studies of particular Chopin stories-including some lesser-known stories-within specific cultural contexts"--

Book Synopsis

Kate Chopin around the World: Global Perspectives offers a fresh, international lens on Chopin's impact on readers around the world. Contributors from multiple continents situate Chopin's fiction within national and regional locales, reflecting on the reading, researching, and teaching of her work through different cultural lenses. Essays, from both new and seasoned Chopin scholars, draw from a range of critical approaches to demonstrate the broad-reaching effects Chopin has had around the globe. At times, their essays are personal, as contributors reflect on the profound effect the author's fiction had on their lives, research, and even students. Read together, the essays offer a rich conversation with a multiplicity of perspectives from different countries and cultures, demonstrating the incredible influence Chopin-a nineteenth-century American widow who sought to support her six children through her writing-has had on readers, scholars, and teachers for generations.

Review Quotes

"In just over half a century since the Kate Chopin revival of the 1960s, when her novels and stories were available only in English, her fiction, especially The Awakening, has been translated into twenty-four languages and published across the world. Authoritative Chopin scholar, Heather Ostman has introduced and edited this ground-breaking collection of critical essays documenting Chopin's published international presence by leading scholars Bernie Koloski (France), Helen Taylor (Britain), Heidi M. Podlasli (Germany), and Eulalia Piñero Gil (Spain) as well as by newer critical voices from Russia, Italy, South Asia, and Qatar. This is a milestone volume, reflecting Chopin's arrival on the world's stages. "

"Ostman's volume confirms that for nearly the last century, Chopin's work has traveled the globe, garnering more interest across continents than the author of local color fiction ever could have hoped to achieve in her lifetime. Although informed by her European ancestry and American birth, Chopin's fiction does not belong to any one nation; its explorations of the tensions between individual freedoms and cultural institutions contain endless uses for audiences across time and place."

About the Author

Heather Ostman is director of the Humanities Institute and the Humanities Curriculum Chair, as well as professor of English at SUNY Westchester Community College.