Featuring essays by scholars from around the globe, Kate Chopin in Context revitalizes discussions on the famed 19th-century author of The Awakening . Expanding the horizons of Chopin's influence, contributors offer readers glimpses into the multi-national appreciation and versatility of the author's works, including within the classroom setting.

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.

This book examines the feminist rhetorics that emerge in six very different activists' autobiographies, as they simultaneously tell the stories of unconventional women's lives and manifest the authors' arguments for social and political change, as well as provide blueprints for creating tectonic shifts in American society Exploring self-narratives by six diverse women at the forefront of radical social change since 1900 - Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Angela Davis, Mary Crow Dog, and Betty Friedan - the author offers a breadth of perspectives to current dialogues on motherhood, essentialism, race, class, and feminism The book also highlights the shifts in situated feminist rhetorics through the course of the last one hundred years This book will be a timely instructional resource for all scholars and graduate students in rhetorical studies, composition, American literature, women studies, feminist rhetorics, and social justice

This book explores the Catholic aesthetic and mystical dimensions in Kate Chopin's fiction within the context of an evolving American Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close reading of her novels and numerous short stories, Kate Chopin and Catholicism looks at the ways Chopin represented Catholicism in her work as a literary device that served on multiple levels: as an aesthetic within local color depictions of Louisiana, as a trope for illuminating the tensions surrounding nineteenth-century women's struggles for autonomy, as a critique of the Catholic dogma that subordinated authenticity and physical and emotional pleasure, and as it pointed to the distinction between religious doctrine and mystical experience, and enabled the articulation of spirituality beyond the context of the Church. This book reveals Chopin to be not only a literary visionary but a writer who saw divinity in the natural world.

The influence of Latin American writers-as well as other immigrant writers and their first-generation peers-has reframed the literary lens to include multiple views and codify the shift away from the tradition of white male writers who formed the core of the American literary canon for generations. Junot Diaz is one of the most prominent and influential writers in contemporary American literature. A first-generation Dominican American, the New Jersey native is at the forefront of a literary renaissance, portraying the significant demographic shifts taking place in the United States. In The Fiction of Junot Diaz: Reframing the Lens, Heather Ostman closely examines the linguistic, popular culture, and literary references woven throughout Diaz's fiction, including the short story collections Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, as well as the Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Ostman also considers Diaz's work as it relates to issues of identity, citizenship, culture, aesthetics, language, class, gender, and race. By exploring how Diaz reframes the immigrant narrative-highlighting his innovative linguistic and genre-based approach-Ostman provides crucial insights into how Diaz's writings relate to key issues in today's world. The Fiction of Junot Diaz will be of interest to scholars and students of the immigrant experience as well as fans of this gifted writer.

This book explores the Catholic aesthetic and mystical dimensions in Kate Chopin's fiction within the context of an evolving American Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close reading of her novels and numerous short stories, Kate Chopin and Catholicism looks at the ways Chopin represented Catholicism in her work as a literary device that served on multiple levels: as an aesthetic within local color depictions of Louisiana, as a trope for illuminating the tensions surrounding nineteenth-century women's struggles for autonomy, as a critique of the Catholic dogma that subordinated authenticity and physical and emotional pleasure, and as it pointed to the distinction between religious doctrine and mystical experience, and enabled the articulation of spirituality beyond the context of the Church. This book reveals Chopin to be not only a literary visionary but a writer who saw divinity in the natural world.

WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION Series Editors: Susan H. McLeod and Margot Soven WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION AND THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE offers a comprehensive study of the administration of writing programs at public, two-year institutions. Author Heather Ostman describes the community college's diverse students, who shape its mission with their changing needs and demographics. A history of the community college places the institution within the broader context of American higher education and is followed by practical information about the day-to-day work of the WPA at the two-year college. WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION AND THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE also addresses current issues and concerns faced by WPAs and writing instructors, including the politics of and future for composition at community colleges. Writing Program Administration and the Community College will deepen the understanding of composition and WPA work at this institution for all WPAs-at community colleges and four-year institutions, composition instructors, college administrators, and graduate students pursuing careers in the field. HEATHER OSTMAN is an assistant professor and the assistant chair of the SUNY Westchester Community College English Department, where she teaches courses in writing and literature. Before joining Westchester, she served as the writing program coordinator at the Metropolitan Manhattan campus of the State University of New York's Empire State College. Her work has appeared in essay collections and in journals such as College Composition and Communication, Women's Studies, Prose Studies, Philological Quarterly, and New Writing. She is the editor of Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays (2008) and serves as the President of the Kate Chopin International Society. She is also the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities and the Westchester Community College Foundation Faculty Excellence Award in Scholarship. In 2012, she and her colleague Frank Madden were awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant for Two-Year Colleges to establish and co-direct the SUNY Westchester Community College Humanities Institute, which provides curricula, events, and pedagogical training in the humanities with an emphasis on the immigrant experience in the United States.