A wide range of short fiction by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman is the focus for this study, examining both genre and theme. Chopin's short stories, Wharton's novellas, Chopin's frankly erotic writing and the homilies in which Gilman warns of the dangers of the sexually transmitted disease are compared. There are also essays on ethnicity in the work of Chopin, Wharton's New England stories, Gilman's innovative use of genre and 'The Yellow Wallpaper' on film. All three writers are still popular in US classrooms in particular. This paperback edition includes a new Preface to the material, providing a useful update on recent scholarship.

" ... The first comprehensive assessment of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's richly complex feminism."--Back cover.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is one of the key texts in American women's fiction and also a rallying cry for feminism. Since its original printing in 1892, it has been routinely anthologized in collections of women's literature, American literature, and textbooks. This volume gathers nine other equally momentous stories by a diverse group of renowned American women authors who changed the world with their compelling tales. These ten stories testify to the power of the imagination to create personal transformation and political change. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was an American author of novels, short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She was also a utopian feminist who gained fame and developed a social circle of like-minded activists and writers of the feminist movement as she lectured widely for social reform. She is most known today for her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper."Ulrich Baer earned a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Yale. A widely published author, he is University Professor at New York University, and has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Alexander von Humboldt fellowships. He has written numerous books on poetry, photography and cultural politics, and edited and translated Rainer Maria Rilke's The Dark Interval, Letters on Life, and Letters to a Young Poet. He hosts leading writers and artists on the "Think About It" podcast. In the Warbler Press Contemplations series, he has published: Nietzsche, Rilke, Dickinson, Wilde, and Shakespeare on Love.

Known to her contemporaries as a fervent advocate of reform on social, economic, and religious fronts, designated an "optimist reformer" by William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) today is celebrated more as a writer of novels and short stories, particularly Herland and The Yellow Wallpaper, than as the author of the many social and political essays that originally made her so prominent. The essayists in this spirited volume return to Gilman's primary focus by reminding us that the main purpose of her writing was reform. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer looks at Gilman's legacy for women at the end of the twentieth century; in doing so its contributors reassess both her reformist ideas and our own views on fin de siecle feminism. Gilman scholarship has indeed moved on from the much needed recovery of her work to more critical treatments that allow us to acknowledge elements now regarded as unacceptable. As a result, the essayists here reappraise Gilman and her writings in ways that directly address hithertofore overlooked points, such as her racism, her almost willful disregard of issues of class, and her broadly essentialist view of women. The effect of this collection is thus twofold: Gilman and her works are both reassessed in light of current feminist thought and presented in the context of her own time. A constant theme is the recognition of her unwavering belief that things could be changed for the better; it is this persistent optimism that made her such a forceful voice for reform. Thus the essayists demonstrate that engagement with Gilman's reformist views is still pertinent for feminist debate today.

This wide-ranging introduction to the short story tradition in the United States of America traces the genre from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century with Irving, Hawthorne and Poe via Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner to O'Connor and Carver. The major writers in the genre are covered in depth with a general view of their work and detailed discussion of a number of examples of individual stories. The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to this rich literary tradition. It will be invaluable to students and readers looking for critical approaches to the short story and wishing to deepen their understanding of how authors have approached and developed this fascinating and challenging genre. Further reading suggestions are included to explore the subject in more depth. This is an invaluable overview for all students and readers of American fiction.

"The study emphasizes the crucial role that Wharton's contact with Europe had on her writing, and the significance intellectually and politically of her relationship with Morton Fullerton and her reading of his books on politics. It locates Wharton in her period, surrounded as she was by discourses which called for political and social change, change which an outlook that Peel calls "American Toryism" made her reluctant to embrace. Her love of motorcars and her excitement about other technological developments such as aeroplanes was inspired by a feeling of exclusivity and not the democratization of culture, which she feared and condemned. France, England, Italy, and America formed the quartet of countries that contained the best and worst of culture, and Peel emphasizes how ironical it was that a writer whose ideological beliefs endorsed the importance of home, roots, and tradition should have spent so much of her life as a restless, apparently rootless traveler."--BOOK JACKET.

Although she enjoyed only modest success during her lifetime, Kate Chopin is now recognised as a unique voice in American literature. Her seminal novel, The Awakening, published in 1899, explored new and startling territory, and stunned readers with its frank depiction of the limits of marriage and motherhood. Chopin's aesthetic tastes and cultural influences were drawn from both the European and American traditions, and her manipulation of her 'foreignness' contributed to the composition of a complex voice that was strikingly different to that of her contemporaries. The essays in this Companion treat a wide range of Chopin's stories and novels, drawing her relationship with other writers, genres and literary developments, and pay close attention to the transatlantic dimension of her work. The result is a collection that brings a fresh perspective to Chopin's writing, one that will appeal to researchers and students of American, nineteenth-century, and feminist literature.