Absent babies and cosmopolitan bananas : fault lines, networks, and modernity in Kate Chopin's At fault / Deborah Lindsay Williams -- Reconciling the (post)plantation in At fault : reunion romance, western expansionism, and the (neo)liberal turn / Natalie Aikens -- "Miss T'rèse's system" : At fault and Antebellum nostalgia / Nadine M. Knight -- So Melicent is a Unitarian : who's At fault? / Emily Toth -- What Hosmer wants : male aspirations in At fault / Bernard Koloski -- Kate Chopin's queer etiologies : what's At fault in the history of sexuality / Michael P. Bibler -- Quick, dead, and widowed : failed reading of "unwholesome intellectual sweets" and the importance of knowing whose story you're in / John A. Staunton -- Divorce and the new woman : precedents to modernism in At fault / Heather Ostman -- Personified matter : empowered things in Kate Chopin's At fault / Susan Moldow -- "Thérèse was love's prophet" : the emotional discourse and the depiction of feelings in Kate Chopin's At fault / Eulalia Piñero Gil.
Summary:
"The New View from Cane River features ten in-depth essays that provide diverse perspectives on Kate Chopin's first novel, At Fault (1890). While much critical work on Chopin prioritizes her famous, groundbreaking second novel, The Awakening (1899), At Fault remains, as the contributors to this collection show, a fascinating text that addresses difficult topics such as divorce, alcoholism, and murder. Set on the banks of the Cane River after the Civil War, At Fault tells the story of Thérèse Lafirme, a thirty-five-year-old widow who manages her deceased husband's plantation, Place-du-Bois. Although she initially chooses to uphold religious-based ideals at the expense of happiness with the man she loves, a series of melodramatic and tumultuous events lead Thérèse to question her own moral rigidity and embrace a new marriage based in equality. Edited by Chopin scholar Heather Ostman, the essays in The New View from Cane River offer multiple approaches for understanding this text, with particular attention to the dynamics of the post-Civil War era and its effects on race, gender, and economics in Louisiana. New perspectives introduced by the contributors include discussions of Chopin's treatment of privilege, sexology, and Unitarianism, as well as what At Fault reveals about the early stages of literary modernism and the reading audiences of late nineteenth-century America"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.