The New View from Cane River

Critical Essays on Kate Chopin's "At Fault"

Heather Ostman

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780807177785
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The New View from Cane River features ten in-depth essays that provide fresh, diverse perspectives on Kate Chopin's first novel, At Fault. While much critical work on the author prioritizes her famous, groundbreaking second book, The Awakening, its 1890 predecessor remains a fascinating text that presents a complicated moral universe, including a plot that involves divorce, alcoholism, and murder set in the aftermath of the Civil War. Edited by Chopin scholar Heather Ostman, the essays in The New View from Cane River provide multiple approaches for understanding this complex work, with particular attention to the dynamics of the post-Reconstruction era and its effects on race, gender, and economics in Louisiana. Original 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.This overdue reconsideration of an overlooked novel gives enthusiastic readers, students, and instructors an opportunity for new encounters with a cherished American author.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Absent Babies and Cosmopolitan Bananas: Fault Lines, Networks, and Modernity in At Fault
• Reconciling the (Post)Plantation in At Fault: Reunion Romance, Western Expansionism, and the (Neo)Liberal Turn
• “Miss T’rèse’s System”: At Fault and Antebellum Nostalgia
• So Melicent Is a Unitarian: Who’s At Fault?
• What Hosmer Wants: Male Aspirations in At Fault
• Kate Chopin’s Queer Etiologies: What’s At Fault in the History of Sexuality
• Quick, Dead, and Widowed: Failed Reading of “Unwholesome Intellectual Sweets” and the Importance of Knowing Whose Story You’re In
• Divorce and the New Woman: Precedents to Modernism in At Fault
• Personified Matter: Empowered Things in At Fault
• “Thérèse Was Love’s Prophet”: The Emotional Discourse and the Depiction of Feelings in At Fault
• Contributors
• Index