Travel into the Deep South to the plantations, town houses, shanties, bayous and swamps along the Mississippi. The book ends with the novel The Awakening, shocking in its day with a frankness and honesty about topics usually kept under wraps. Henry and Saki with totally unexpected, ironic endings. She displays a strong mastery of dialect. Though there are examples of ornate and formulaic usage, Chopin’s use of language is rather modern. There are occasional examples of stereotyping and even a bit of overt racism ascribable perhaps more to the prevailing temper of the times more than to Chopin herself. There is a wide range of characters including Caucasians, Anglo-Americans, Latinos, Afro-Americans, creoles and mulattos, all in sympathetic and complex roles. The stories explore a variety of themes: love, fear, sanity, temptation, fidelity.

ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford Worlds Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Even the women who seem to be subservient or docile in the opening of a story develop into characters who begin to exercise choices and move toward lives richer in personal freedom. The Awakening is set alongside thirty-two short stories, illustrating the spectrum of the fiction from her first published stories to her 1898 secret masterpiece, The Storm. Chopin is often regarded as a forerunner of the feminist authors of the 20th Century and, indeed, most of the stories feature strong women, usually as the main character. The Awakening is set alongside thirty-two short stories, illustrating the spectrum of the fiction from her first published stories to her 1898 secret masterpiece, 'The Storm'. After an Introduction by Lewis Leary the book begins with twenty short stories, most of which had been previously published in magazines with national circulation. The Awakening and Other Stories by Kate Chopin is a prime example of the genre. Sometimes called “local color,” the fiction of that genre has a particular emphasis on setting and a focus on landscape, dialect, history, customs and the narrative tradition of storytelling. Regional Realism is a characteristic element in American Literature from the mid to late Nineteenth Century into the early Twentieth Century.

The awakening and other stories