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The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Edited by Janet Beer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xii + 184 pp. $29.99.
Kate Chopin aficionados will find this volume refreshing in its breadth. While The Awakening is given due treatment, Chopin's novel At Fault and many of her lesser-known short stories are given primacy. "Athenaise," for example, is discussed in more than half of the essays. Readers who are drawn to Chopin through her undermining of the conventional in The Awakening and in her oft-anthologized stories will relish this probing excavation of her rich remaining oeuvre in the dozen essays collected here. Noteworthy in Janet Beer's introduction is her discussion of Chopin's Santien brothers, men of ill repute who serve as "agents of change in women's lives" across several of the fictions (3). Male characters, as Beer points out, are seldom the objects of critical analysis in Chopin studies; thus, the editor throws down the gauntlet, provoking readers to consider new and important scholarship in the field.
Among the most useful essays in advancing Chopin scholarship with new research and formidable argumentation are those by Avril Horner, Ann Heilmann, Emily...