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

The Historian's 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 people's lives.

• Introduces the novel with essays on the life and times of the author by a leading Chopin scholar

• Includes two hundred annotations

• Illustrates that understanding nineteenth-century women's struggles, like that of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, demands attention to more than the usual focus on the oppression of women by men

• Shows that Edna's 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 today

• Offers readers a deeper and more rewarding reading of The Awakening